Between Welt and Schmerz
in relation to
To Compound Is to Tremble, Kulturfolger, Zurich, CH
Welt and Schmerz each carry their own symbolic weight, yet something happens where they meet that neither could call forth alone. An overwhelm of feeling. The compound holds them together, without reconciling, and from this relation the speaking subject reaches across for meaning.
Compound, then, is not just a linguistic operation. It might also name a way of being in relation. What if the self, too, is something like a compound? Not a speaking I, complete before it encounters – and is dispossessed by – others, but something that takes shape, finds and forms meaning, through attachment, (mis)recognition, dependency, conflict, withdrawal, or desire. The other enters into who I become without becoming mine or my own.
I think of my empty mouth, which once had no words but eventually formed the capacity to utter that I was hungry, or that I liked climbing apple trees in my grandmother’s garden. Even the ability to roll my tongue and push it against the back of my front teeth to now articulate a Weltschmerz. What might be called the self – and the means this self has to express itself – is already inhabited by others. My mother tongue is not mine but my mother’s. Even if I did not have a mother, I would still have internalised an external speaking object, just as I am internalising German now, where I do not and will not have a mother.
But if the self is constituted through what comes from elsewhere, the boundary between what is mine and what is other is full of cracks. The speaking subject is inevitably a stranger even to itself: I cannot fully know what I mean, remember, or carry. The unconscious interrupts any fantasy that I might first belong entirely to myself and only afterwards enter into relation with others. Something in me remains unavailable to me, even as it speaks through me. If the other exceeds my knowledge, then so, differently, do I. The opacity I encounter between you and me is already there within what I call myself.
And yet a boundary full of cracks is still a boundary. To say that I am inhabited by others is not to say that there is no distinction between you and I. Perhaps it is the opposite: relation gives separation its meaning. Another person can affect me profoundly; I can carry something of their imprint – a memory, an internalised object, a tongue – while they remain beyond my possession. What I carry of you is not, after all, the same thing as you.
Don’t I know it? Having fallen in love and out of love, I wonder whether I have ever really known those I tried loving, and those who might have loved me. Intimacy, even in its most dispossessing modes of expression – the hands of two separate, that is to say, bordered, bodies clutching in the middle of the night – does not eliminate this distance. It makes us encounter it differently.
But it might not be enough to say that you remain other to me, because I never experience you as something untouched by myself. I encounter you through what I want from you, what I fear you might withhold, through those I have loved before you, through what I imagine you to be. I misrecognise you even as I try to recognise you. There is no unmediated version of you, beyond transference, that I might finally learn to perceive correctly.
Perhaps an ethics – a consciously uttered way of being with others in the world, feeling its pain – begins here. Not in escaping misrecognition, but in remaining attentive to the possibility that you exceed the version of you I have made. Proximity need not demand assimilation. The other remains other even as something passes between us. Like Welt and Schmerz, we meet without becoming identical, holding hands to feel, at least to grasp, the meaning of what is here and now, between two objects, you and I.
Like Weltschmerz, I also cannot smoothly translate it – cannot give a precise linguistic form to what I might call the inside the boundaries of my own skin, and yours, and how they encounter each other. And now I will deliberately not write a metaphor here, even if I could compare it to a tide, a mountain range, or late November rain, because that would betray exactly what I am trying to say.
Or, more accurately perhaps, I would like to take a pause here, for this essay is already inevitably operating through a metaphor. There is no escaping figurative language while trying to respect what exceeds representation. But perhaps metaphor, bringing unlike things into proximity without claiming they are identical, is itself doing what I am trying to describe. It cannot completely capture its object. And that is not a failure.
This way of holding hands – that is to say, this embodied, provisional iteration of ethics – requires a particular kind of vulnerability: a willingness to be affected by what cannot be fully understood or completely incorporated into oneself. Relation is, then, an unstable movement between exposure and boundary. Vulnerability, in this sense, does not mean the loss of boundary. It describes a boundary capable of registering an encounter. It trembles. My skin feels yours – even if we might never touch – because by skin I mean that which separates oneself-as-object from the world and, in separating, connects one to it.
This is where the seam becomes important. If Welt and Schmerz were two different fabrics stitched together, the seam exists because there has been, and remains, a separation. Two surfaces meet while remaining two surfaces. The seam neither heals the cut nor leaves it untouched. It materialises the relation the cut makes possible.
I would like to think that relational ethics begins here: not with the fantasy of overcoming distance, nor of completely being one’s own, but with the question of how distance can be inhabited. An overwhelm of feeling, like Weltschmerz. How can I recognise you through everything I imagine you to be while remaining open to the possibility that you are – and will be – otherwise? How can we remain distinct enough to encounter one another, and open enough for that encounter to leave a trace?
I would like to think that this trace is what my empty mouth, one day, itself surprised, bewildered almost, pronounces as your name.
© Studio Lesutis & Miljević