Referential Instability of Language & Political Implications of Pain: A Case Study, Ejercicios de Literatura inglesa

¡Descarga Referential Instability of Language & Political Implications of Pain: A Case Study y más Ejercicios en PDF de Literatura inglesa solo en Docsity! PRELIMINARY ESSAY What are the political implications of the referential instability of the language of pain? Consider a case of your own. The problem with physical pain is that we do not have referential content, that is we do not have an intentional object that causes it. That is why there is a huge difference between emotional and physical pain, since the structure of our feelings is always feeling something for someone or something, but physical pain is caused because of something. Besides, emotional pain has an intentional object. The only way of describing physical pain is describing what causes it, the weapon. However, transmitting our pain becomes challenging because of two features that are the aversiveness and it does not have referential content outside the mind of the suffer. The lack of an intentional object is the main characteristic. That does not mean that my feelings do not exist, despite that the intentional object can be imaginary like when you are in love with a fictional character, that character does not exist in real life, but my feeling are existing. One important solution is using linguistics agents. We use the language of agency that is the language of action of certain tool upon your body. It is the only way of expressing physical pain with words. For example, if you have sharp pain, you describe the nature of your pain in terms of the object it is used to cause it. With instability we refer to the language of weapons that are designed to hurt and serve to make physical pain visible. But we cannot see the pain behind it. We cannot focus on the power of weapon and the pain at the same time. That instability means we only see the power although it can carry danger or pain, and we do not see the suffer that power causes to the people who are powerless. For instance, it is the case of the American army. We see the USA as a powerful nation since its army owns a huge number of weapons, but we do not see that army causes pain to other countries to obtain benefits from them and gain power. Another example can be the COVID-19 which has caused a huge amount of deaths. This virus is the weapon that causes these deaths. We are not able to imagine how many people died and are dying because of it, we are only seeing a number. It is becoming something normal to us seeing the news with new deaths every day. We are normalizing it.