Parole Text:Buch

A man who is slowly losing himself: His body and mind are not merely exhausted but virtually sick from work. The man is the narrator’s father, for whom she is caring. Yet she, too, is about to be losing her hair, losing her strength, and she is troubled by the thought, she might lose her language as well. To grapple with these anxieties, she starts a conversation with a chabot. Her new-born child, whom she beds next to her father, will soon begin to speak and claim language for itself—the very language that the grandfather has lost to Parkinson’s disease.

The writer Josefine Soppa masterfully entwines the big issues of acquiring and maintaining language, and language loss, with new modes of linguistic reproduction enabled by AI, linking them to the topics of labour, mental exhaustion, and sickness. Exposing the logic of calculation inherent in both automated speech generation and the conditions of caregiving, she exhibits great skill and elegance to construct a frame of reference from the perceived analogy between pathological conditions and mechanical language processes, making the capitalist and material foundations of this seemingly ‘disembodied‘ technology clearly visible.“

Motivation speech for awarding the WORTMELDUNGEN Ulrike Crespo Literary Prize for Critical Short Prose 2024 to the prize winner Josefine Soppa.