UC Berkeley

What does it mean to say "yes" to life, physically? "Recovering the pain" is a retrieval of the emotional and physical difficulty contained, as Emmanuel Levinas would phrase it, "in our being alive," and an insistence on the significance of that difficulty for life. It is a work for the feeling that survives in the rigors of our living, a work that exposes the pain by which we are moved to life and recovers the pain by which we know that we are alive. Of intrigue is a mode of insistent, if religious, importance that feels like it should issue a meaning but that cannot be lived to its end or settled with: a mode of emotional significance in which pain is a feeling of life without its meaning. Only what is "still incomplete," still "in holding," I will wager, is "still living." The dissertation is a witness to difficulty, but it goes beyond interpretation. The demand of the feeling compels the author to deliver the work in a style exemplary to the experience itself: its recovery is hermeneutic and physical. "Recovering the pain" is both a philosophy of difficult living and a sustained poetic bearing of its knowledge. If living is painful, the orthodox assumption that pain is an unpraiseworthy experience may be said to be negligent. The dubious aesthetic, medical, and psychological grounds upon which this assumption and the accompanying removal of hindrances rests deserve scrutiny. This dissertation diagnoses in these discourses a phobia about the pathos of lingering. Is the prejudice against pain internal to life, is the reconciliatory process internal to the body? Life defrauds our expectation to "become well, again," to forsake (to leave without intending to return) difficulty, because life does not seek relief. To be prejudiced against difficulty is to be prejudiced against the weight incurred by living. Against the various forms of relief sought by the living, this work cares about what it means to live intensely, to live through experience honestly. Rigor and fidelity, it senses, are physical. The stakes of the thought are ethical and existential. Are "serviceable" ways of feeling consonant with physical significance? When we "heal" a person, do we bring life back to them or do we abuse the life inside of them? If praiseworthy falls on the side of that which does not pain (burden, move) us, this encomium is not on the side of the physical fact of living, the feeling as fact. In its concern with the honor of feeling, the dissertation situates devotion and ethics physically. It asks what it means to do justice to life physically and delivers, in response, an heretical moral and theological physiology. Extending across phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Jewish ethics and esoteric theology, philosophy of medicine, and performance studies, the dissertation brings new depth to our understanding of deliverance (carrying and being carried), rectification (tikkun), action (ma'aseh), belonging, participation, and religiosity in human experience. While it remains to be answered whether originality may be claimed in the experience of difficulty, something is at stake in suggesting that the struggle by which living is announced is in significant part Jewish and that it is in the Jewish agon that this struggle may be felt. Challenging the existential credentials of religious practice, Judaism, this dissertation argues, is an "internal problem" and Jewish feeling is a complication lived from the inside. Can we only rely on internal evidence? A new meaning is brought to masoretic belonging: technique is secondary to emotional rigor. Religious life is physical. There is no masorah (tradition) without experience: involvement in the (Jewish) feeling is experiential; it cannot be taught, it requires living through. This thought internalizes the stakes of, and seeks to engage, the following writers: Roland Barthes, Georges Canguilhem, Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Søren Kierkegaard, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Osip Mandelstam, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Miguel de Unamuno, Lev Shestov, Joseph Soloveitchik, Simone Weil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. On these grounds, the dissertation proceeds in three distinct movements. The first movement expounds the phenomenological significance of difficulty inside the body: the "life" of the feeling. The second movement examines the person's aspiration to get (a meaning) out of life and the accompanying effort to "come to terms" with its pain: the phobia in any remission from pain. It exposes the homology between difficulty and the motor reaction: to recover from pain is to move away from it and to be removed from life. In this effort, the search for meaning struggles within and against the significance of life, it is itself a mode of relief. The third movement reinterprets recovery: it performs an inward-turning and backward recovery of difficulty to the body and examines the kinds of experience that emerge within these constraints. That we are not in agreement with life, that we are "torn apart, within"—the effort of our struggle within life—is not pathological, it is essential. Attending to "indicators of authenticity" like tone and gesture, the section offers a physical interpretation of fidelity by reading devotion to life in the body of the person. This is not a work about the survival of the person. It is a work about the struggle of the person within the survival of the feeling.