Provocative and rhythmical movements of critical thinking. Wide openness and the powers of gravity in Alfred Lorenzer’s theory of language

Abstract

This article examines conditions for the realisation of the critical potential of language. Beginning with the subject that is being touched and reached by language, as we can find it for example in existentially meaningful experiences of reading, some metaphors of Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of the body are used to think about these elements of being moved and excited by language. In a further step the critical potential of language is presented in contexts of openness and wideness as well as an empowering and active play with social boundaries. At the same time, language has to confront itself with earthly issues, has to relate to material conditions, the needs and desires of the body and everyday life. It can be seen as paradoxical that language which tends to freedom and does not want to be misused for manipulation, hatred or ideological ends, has to confine itself by referring to such material, earthly constraints as mentioned above. Alfred Lorenzer’s theory of language allows to bring all these aspects together. The earthly and material find their way into this theory by means of combining two traditions of critical thought: Freud’s Psychoanalysis and Marx’s Historical Materialism. According to this, Lorenzer places the psychoanalytical process into a context of destruction of language and reconstruction of the same; communication within the therapeutical setting always refers to the practical sides of everyday life and language as shared by a community of users. In order to make psychoanalytic theory fruitful for the social sciences, two final illustrations of the potential of language are presented: First an analyses of commercial symbolisms around shopping malls and new architectures of consumption. Secondly, a personal experience of reading is shared with a literary text by the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard. Key words: critical theory, psychoanalysis, theory of language, philosophy of the body, gestalt psychology, critique of totalitarianism, mass media and advertising, hermeneutical analysis of literature