Metaphor has been elevated and absolutized, but also exhausted and problematized in modernity. Above that, the language sign/symbol has been revealed as arbitrary and functional wherever imagination has failed. Metaphor exploits external or situational analogy, which is not arbitrary, if we consider it within a communicative situation. For this reason, metaphor has been pushed out of the focus of linguistics. Postmodern resignation to consistency and completeness of explanation has led to using metaphors – otherwise irreplaceable in forming new ideas and experiences – instead of definitions of concepts. We want to show that concepts can and should be analysed and defined. We propose that one can analyse in this way the problem of universal grammar and recursion in language. Reflecting on the function of metaphor in philosophy, we show that philosophical explanations are applicable in other disciplines dealing with language and communication.
The subject of the analysis is the novel Leben (Life, 2013) by the German author David Wagner. In fact, although designed as a novel, the book is more precisely an autopathography, which presents a personal and authentically reflective look at the experience of one’s own illness and describes the medical intervention, the surgical transplantation of a new liver. The medical specialist discourse plays an essential role in this context. Medical knowledge and personal reflections overlap like those areas of meaning from which analogies often emerge and in which metaphors have their origin. In the following, it is a matter of uncovering those areas that are combined to create analogies in order to describe their communicative function on the basis of their possible implementation in the form of metaphors (also known as between-domain analogies). Particular consideration is given to the role of the medical specialist discourse and the question of how it shapes the analogisation and metaphorization of one’s own experience of illness and the experience of organ transplantation. In doing so, we rely largely on the analytical model based on the theory of figurative language by Hans Georg Coenen.
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