Klage

Lament is not a preliminary form of praising God, nor is suffering a noble form of happiness. Lament is lament, and suffering is suffering. Renouncing any rhetoric of an internal alteration of the negative, Jochen Schmidt describes lament as a human practice which due to its expressive potential opens up new possibilities of self-interpretation and can thus alleviate suffering. Against the backdrop of a phenomenological analysis of »reflective« individual suffering, this monograph proposes a theory of lament which draws upon phenomenology, literary aesthetics and systematic theology.