Abstract
The article aims at reconstructing how pain is used in contemporary societies in the process of engraving power. Firstly, a social phenomenological analysis of pain is conducted: Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s ideas are used for clarifying the experience of pain itself; Elaine Scarry’s analyses are overviewed in order to reconstruct how pain contributes to the establishing of power. Secondly, this complex approach is applied in early modern context: the parallel processes of the decline of a transcendental and the emergence of a medical interpretation of pain is introduced, along with the marginalization of violence. Thirdly, the era characterized by the triumph of medical pain management is analysed: it is argued that the constitutive role of pain in establishing power does not cease to exist with the emergence of technologies of discursive governance (Foucault); it is an open question, what sort of power is engraved through pain understood in strictly medical frames.
Highlights
Physical pain is one of the most elementary human experiences
The era characterized by the triumph of medical pain management is analysed: it is argued that the constitutive role of pain in establishing power does not cease to exist with the emergence of technologies of discursive governance (Foucault); it is an open question, what sort of power is engraved through pain understood in strictly medical frames
These analyses introduce discursive transformations, which resulted in the birth of a “biomedical paradigm.”
Summary
Most pain theories attempt to clarify its ontological status, which proves to be a controversial task: on the one hand, it seems to be localizable in the body; on the other hand, it may be experienced without any obvious organic cause or bodily locus, which implies a psychic origin. Scarry chooses an atypical starting point: instead of focusing on accidental injury or illness, she focuses on wounds inflicted in the process of torture or war (which are par excellence social phenomena) Such choice has consequences for the whole phenomenology of pain, as it provides access to those aspects, which remain in the blindspot of epistemological approaches.[14] According to her, even if pain is a pre-linguistic experience, it is capable of affecting the existing meanings by erasing them and providing a new framework for rewriting.[15] This destructive capacity is used in the process of torture: the continuous invasive pain gradually fills up the horizon of lifeworld, until the point the victim is reduced to a bare body in pain. This social phenomenological approach is applied while attempting to answer the questions: what kind of interpretations of pain are born in early and late modern constellations?; and what sort of power is grounded by the praxes based on them?
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