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7 Apr 2016

Rethinking The Body in Pain

Michael McIntyre
Department of International Studies


By most measures, Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985) has been a stunning academic success story. Continuously in print for nearly thirty years, it still ranks among Amazon’s (2015) top ten sellers in literary theory and counts over six thousand academic citations (Google Scholar 2015). Reviewed upon its release by prominent public intellectuals in New Republic (Ignatieff 1985), Commonweal (Wyschogrod 1986), TLS (Byatt 1986), New York Times Book Review (Suleiman 1986), New York Review of Books (Singer 1986), and London Review of Books (Shklar 1986), it has nonetheless not been until now the subject of systematic retrospective. While it has proved unusually fertile as a source of fresh thinking, few have extensively engaged its philosophical argument, Moyn (2013) being one notable exception.

This brief paper can hardly make claim to such an extended engagement, but within its brief compass it will attempt to come to grips with the philosophical core of Scarry’s argument and critique it on home ground. That core, to recap with utmost brevity, is that the self is constructed through the linguistic cathexis between body and world. Pain destroys that cathexis and therefore destroys the self. There is a great deal to be said in favor of this core argument; no attempt will be made here to overturn it. It will be suggested, however, that Scarry makes a signal error at the very beginning of her argument when she suggests that pain is sheerly aversive (1985, p. 52). A more complicated phenomenology of pain will be suggested in its place, and some of its consequences explored.



The Argument Restated


Pain, according to Scarry, has a dual face. The one who suffers pain cannot not know that she is in pain. Because pain is felt solely by the sufferer and resists expression in language, however, the sufferer’s pain is not nearly so readily confirmable for others. “[P]ain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed” (Scarry 1985, p. 4). Pain is therefore multiply isolating. Our linguistic resources for its expression are scant. Pain reduces language to a cry. Unlike other states, pain has no external object; it locks the sufferer up inside the body that hurts her (pp. 4-5). In this isolation,

 [i]ntense pain … destroys a person's self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe. Intense pain is also language-destroying: as the content of one's world disintegrates, so the content of one's language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject. Word, self, and voice are lost, or nearly lost…. (p. 35)

 In a second moment, Scarry takes up the political implications of pain’s near-inexpressibility, taking torture to be the institution that makes starkest these implications. In torture, the sufferer feels pain with unbearable acuteness, while the torturer not only does not feel the pain, he “can be in the presence of another person in pain and not know it - not know it to the point where he himself inflicts it and goes on inflicting it” (p. 12). Torture, however, is not an isolated encounter between a victim and a sadist. Torture is a political institution, widespread both geographically and temporally, with an identifiable structure. In that structure, the infliction of pain is invariably paired with imprisonment and interrogation. “Pain and interrogation inevitably occur together in part because the torturer and the prisoner each experience them as opposites. The very question that, within the political pretense, matters so much to the torturer that it occasions his grotesque brutality will matter so little to the prisoner experiencing the brutality that he will give the answer” (p. 29).
In a bizarre inversion, the prisoner’s answer is coded as “betrayal”, a coding made possible by pain’s imperceptibility. By intensifying the prisoner’s experience of pain, the torturer severs her connection to everything outside her body, reducing her to nothing more than a body with nothing left to betray. “Just as the interrogation, like the pain, is a way of wounding, so the pain, like the interrogation, is a vehicle of self-betrayal. Torture systematically prevents the prisoner from being the agent of anything and simultaneously pretends that he is the agent of some things. Despite the fact that in reality he has been deprived of all control over, and therefore all responsibility for, his world, his words, and his body, he is to understand his confession as it will be understood by others, as an act of self-betrayal” (pp. 46-7). The language-game in which the word “betrayal” is ordinarily and unproblematically used has here been replaced by one in which the word no longer has a legitimate use (at least insofar as it refers to the agency of the prisoner). By eliding the two language-games, though, the regime is able to shift the moral opprobrium of torture, at least partially, onto the prisoner who “betrays” rather than the jailor who tortures.

Torture is institutionalized, moreover, not simply in the iterated pantomime of the interrogation. Torture becomes the central performative act in a theater of power. Just as the torturer reduces the voice of the tortured to a cry, the regime that tortures bids to reduce all competing voices to silence. Perversely, bringing torture to public attention can reinforce the regime’s power. Since pain can barely be expressed directly, she who wishes to bring torture into public view must usually resort to a “language of agency” focusing on the wounded prisoner or, more often, the instruments of torture (p. 16). This language of agency, however, is chronically unstable, for instruments of torture, weapons, can also be deployed as insignia of power.

 As an actual physical fact, a weapon is an object that goes into the body and produces pain. As a perceptual fact, it lifts the pain out of the body and makes it visible or, more precisely, it acts as a bridge or mechanism across which some of pain's attributes - its incontestable reality, its totality, its ability to eclipse all else, its power of dramatic alteration and world dissolution - can be lifted away from their source, can be separated from the sufferer and referred to power, broken off from the body and separated from the sufferer and referred to power, broken off from the body and attached instead to the regime. Now, at least for the duration of this obscene and pathetic drama, it is not the pain but the regime that is incontestably real, not pain but the regime that is total, not pain but the regime that is able to eclipse all else, not pain but the regime that is able to dissolve the world. Fraudulent and merciless, this kind of power claims pain's attributes as its own and disclaims the pain itself. (pp. 56-7)
  
The result is a self-enclosed fiction of power in which the incontestable reality of the prisoner’s pain is lifted out of the prisoners body and conferred onto the regime. It is not enough to make torture visible. It must be made visible in a way that brings to attention the regime’s unbearability rather than its power. One can see the difficulties entailed in a singularly well-known counter-theater, the weekly vigils on behalf of the disappeared held by the Madres de la Plaza del Mayo in Buenos Aires. This theater was carefully staged for maximum visibility, in the city’s busiest square during its busiest time. The immediate result of this staging was an evacuation of the stage as porteños fled or avoided this square at the appointed hour. The first act of this drama brought the reality of torture and disappearance under Argentina’s military regime from a passive state of not caring to know to an active state of taking care not to know, as being seen to know brought one far too close to the regime’s power to inflict pain. In retrospect, we know that this state of active not-knowing was not the last act in the play, but the course of the drama shows us that visibility is not a simple counter to torture.


Pain reconsidered

In Scarry’s lengthily-developed and in many ways perceptive phenomenology of pain, the essential error is to be found in the first step, and the one that seems least subject to objection: “The first, most essential aspect of pain is its sheer aversiveness. … If to the person in pain it does not feel averse, and if it does not in turn elicit in that person aversive feelings toward it, it is not in either philosophical or psychological definitions of it called pain” (p. 52). Contrast this view of pain as sheer aversiveness with the wide range of common human activities that often entail pain: exercise, sport, dance, martial arts, motorcycle riding, skydiving, body modification, eating highly spiced food, consumption of tobacco, alcohol, or any number of controlled substances, some forms of meditative practice, labor (whether work or childbirth), depilation, plastic surgery, listening to loud music, long periods of restricted mobility (during gaming, writing, or other sedentary activities), even the dragging of heavy bags and endurance of uncomfortable chairs during academic conferences.

In many of these practices pain is not merely endured as a regrettable but necessary side-effect on the road to some valued goal; pain is cultivated as an intrinsic part of the activity. Dancers who go en pointe are told to “embrace the pain”. Long-distance runners wear t-shirts reading “my sport is your sport’s punishment.” Rugby players sport bumper stickers reading, “Give blood, play rugby.” A tattoo or a piercing is valued, at least in part, because of, not in spite of, the pain entailed in acquiring it. Ghost peppers are eaten for the pain, not for the taste. Cigarettes, motorcycles, skydiving lure with the frisson of danger. In which world do people live lives devoted to the avoidance of pain?

The same problem reemerges in Scarry’s much briefer discussion of pleasure, which she identifies with either “the absence of pain” or “a bodily state in which something other than the body is experienced” (p. 355 n.6). For Scarry, even the most intimate bodily pleasures are finally identified with disembodiment.

 [I]f a thorn cuts through the skin of the woman’s finger, she feels not the thorn but her body hurting her. If instead she experiences across the skin of her fingers not the awareness of the awareness of the feel of those fingers but the feel of the fine weave of another woman’s work, or if she traces the lettering of an engraved message and becomes mindful not of events in her hands but of the form and motivating force of the signs, or if that night she experiences the intense feelings across the skin of her body not as her own body but as the intensely feelable presence of her beloved, she in each of these moments experiences the sensation of ‘touch’ not as bodily sensations but as self-displacing, self-transforming objectification; and so far are these moments from physical pain, that if they are named as bodily occurrences at al, they will be called ‘pleasure,’ a word usually reserved either for moments of overt disembodiment or, as here, moments when acute bodily sensations are experienced as something other than one’s own body. (p. 166)

Surely this must be among the most anemic descriptions of embodied pleasure imaginable. Bodily pleasure must be understood as having positive content, not merely the negative content of pain’s absence. Pleasure, then, cannot be a simple opposite of pain. To better tease out the relationship between pain and pleasure, let us retreat to two near-synonyms of each that can be treated as simple opposites: discomfort and comfort. “Comfort” can readily be used to denote the absence of pain, just as “discomfort” can be used to denote slight pain, or as a euphemism for more severe pain. Correlatively, “pain” can readily be used to mean extreme discomfort, but we one would not ordinarily use “pleasure” to mean “extreme comfort”. Very roughly, it may be said that we use “comfort” to refer to decreased stimulation of the brain’s aversion system and “pleasure” to refer to increased stimulation of the brain’s reward systems. (Scitovsky 1992, p. 59).

Pleasure as mere avoidance of pain is, in the first instance, unattainable and counterproductive. A sedentary life, a life that avoids the discomfort of physical exertion, leads ineluctably to loss of flexibility, loss of muscle mass, loss of anaerobic capacity, and the chronic pain that attends this loss. But many if not most kinds of bodily pleasure require some kind of physical exertion, exertion that at a minimum entails discomfort and frequently pain. Any engagement in sport, for example, requires the first, and any serious training for sport requires the second. Sport and like activities require a relationship to pain that includes acceptance, management, control, endurance, and pleasure in the counterposition of pain and pain’s cessation. Pain itself may be sought as a limit experience, a gateway to forms of consciousness not usually attained. Indeed, that form of consciousness may be precisely an escape from the language-mediated world that Scarry sees as constitutive of self. One need not deny the self-constitutive linguistic cathexis between body and world in order to recognize that the relationship of self to language can also be experienced as an endlessly self-referential loop, a prison-house from which intense embodiment can be sought as a form of escape.

In these intense forms of embodiment, the line between pleasure and pain is by no means entirely clear. Consider the phenomenon of a “second wind,” a point when the discomfort involved in intense physical exertion turns into a more pleasurable experience. Does all discomfort disappear at that point? Certainly not, nor in the course of training does one experience a single threshold after which all exertion becomes easy. Rather, one encounters multiple thresholds, both within a single training session and over a course of training. Pain and pleasure are experienced as a complex flow, not as rival states with a switch thrown that transforms one into the other, for the brain’s aversion and reward systems are not so neatly separable as the very rough distinction sketched above suggests. Excessive stimulus of the reward systems becomes aversive, but there is no simple switch between the two. Rather, stimulus of the aversive system begins while stimulus of the reward systems is still increasing, so that aversion and reward are felt simultaneously. Only later does stimulus become so extreme that the reward systems are shut out (Scitovsky 1992, 60).

Similarly, intense sexual arousal, a bodily state normally associated with pleasure, can become so intense that it becomes aversive, or even painful. Once again, there is no simple transition between one state and the other. Sexual arousal can be experienced as painful and pleasurable, desirable and aversive, simultaneously. Finally, let us consider orgasm, a bodily state sometimes seen as the epitome of bodily pleasure. Can we not recognize here a structural homology with Scarry’s phenomenology of pain? Our linguistic resources for its expression are scant. It renders one’s bodily sensations overwhelmingly present while shutting out much of the external world. It reduces language to a cry. It has no external object. “[P]hysical pain—” Scarry argues, “unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content. It is not of or for anything” (1985, p. 5). But sexual climax is also a state that is “not of or for anything,” even when experienced in the intimate company of another. The obvious distinction, of course, is that pain is paradigmatically (though, as we have seen, not universally) tied to the aversion system while orgasm is paradigmatically tied to the reward systesms, at least up to the point of excessive stimulus. The structural similarities in the somatic experiences of this form of intense pleasure and intense pain, though, indicate that an overly facile opposition of the two is not to be hastily embraced.

Let us briefly consider the gustatory system’s relationship to the reward and aversion systems. Of the four basic tastes – sweet, sour, salt, and bitter – sweetness dominates the reward system. At moderate concentrations, sweetness correlates with the highest levels of gustatory pleasure, pleasure that declines only slightly at much higher concentrations. The pleasures associated with the other three tastes peak at lower concentrations, are much less pleasurable at those peaks, and decline rapidly into intensely unpleasant experience at higher concentrations (Rozin 1999, pp. 115-6). The palate, it might be said, is primed to favor sweets. A palate that always favors sweets, however, is said to be childish or undeveloped. A developed palate integrates odor and taste and seeks complex combinations that stimulate the aversion system as well as the reward systems. One might think of a sexual palate in a similar way, with stimulation of the reward systems to easy climax characteristic of an undeveloped palate and full exploration of the flavors that combine stimulation of the aversion system and reward systems characteristic of mature, sophisticated, sexual taste.


Pathology, fascism, continuity

What has been tendentiously termed here a “mature, sophisticated, sexual taste” is more conventionally denominated “masochism”, still classified along with sadism and sadomasochism as clinical paraphilias. ICD-10 contains the following codes: F65.5 – Sadomasochism, F65.50 – Sadomasochism, unspecified, F65.51 – Sexual masochism, F 65.52 – Sexual sadism (World Health Organization 2015), while DSM-5 recognizes “sexual sadism disorder” and “sexual masochism disorder” as paraphilic disorders if people with these disorders “feel personal distress about their interest, not merely stress resulting from society’s disapproval; or have a sexual desire that involves another person’s psychological distress, injury, or death, or a desire for sexual behaviors involving unwilling persons or persons unable to give legal consent” (American Psychiatric Association 2013). These carefully worded exceptions to the pathologization of masochism and sadism were the result of intense controvery between those who argued for continued clinical diagnoses and those who argued for the depathologization of these practices (Wakefield 2011). The compromise struck, while applying equally to all paraphilic disorders, in fact introduces a marked distinction between sexual masochism disorder and sexual sadism disorder, since masochistic sexual desire never includes “another person’s psychological distress [or] injury,” while sadistic sexual desire, at least arguably, always does.

The relationship of the sadist to pain is utterly unlike that of the masochist. The sadist experiences not the interplay of pain and pleasure but the masochist’s somatic and affective response to pain and pleasure. The sadist’s experience, then, lies in continuum not with those who experience the interplay of pain and pleasure in non-eroticized contexts, but with those who enjoy
the discomforting power bestowed on them by a relationship of authority (or perhaps, in some cases, brute power): the teacher, the coach, the trainer, the judge, the bureaucrat, the priest and a raft of others who are authorized to compel obedience and take pleasure in making compliance difficult. This sort of behavior, however, is far less likely to be considered benign in non-eroticized contexts, and the rubric “sadistic” attaches far more easily to these roles than does “masochistic” to non-eroticized practices. Scarry argues that the torturer must be stupid, must not know what she is doing, must fail to perceive the pain of the tortured in order to do her work. But on this reading the sadist draws satisfaction from not only perception but often heightened and intimate perception of the other’s pain. This opens the possibility that some torturers are not stupid, but sadists who accomplish their work in full knowledge of what they do. We must, then, place sadism under a scrutiny that we would not necessarily attach to masochism. What does the sadist gain from such an interaction, and does her pleasure in such an interaction stand of a piece with the pleasure gained from other kinds of exercise of authority?
Let us consider the Nietzschean possibility that one root of the sadist’s pleasure lies in the pleasure that comes from the power of requital. In a section of Human, All Too Human titled “Dual prehistory of good and evil” Nietzsche posits two rival sources of the distinction between good and bad: “first of all, namely, in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes. Whoever has the power to requite good with good, evil with evil, and who really engages in requital and is therefore grateful and vengeful, is called good; whoever is powerless and cannot engage in requital is considered bad” (Nietzsche 1995, §45). Here the distinction is not between good and evil, because the good requite evil with evil. Good is instead contrasted with contemptibility, powerlessness, abjection. The counterposition of good to evil, in contrast, lies “in the soul of the oppressed, powerless person” who consider “every other person” to be “hostile, inconsiderate, exploitative, cruel, crafty, whether he is noble or base” (Nietzsche 1995, §45).

The power of requital, however, need not be a license for cruelty. What makes it thus? Nietzsche finds the root of cruelty not in the relationship of the noble to the vile, but in the commercial realm of contracts, of legal recourse for the breaking of contractual promises. “Precisely here, promises are made; precisely here, the person making the promise has to have a memory made for him: precisely here, we may suppose, is a repository of hard, cruel, painful things” (Nietzsche 2007, §II,5). In an instance reminiscent of The Merchant of Venice, Nietzsche takes as his paradigmatic example of cruelty the creditor’s “cutting as much flesh as seemed appropriate” from the defaulting debtor. Nietzsche, so often aphoristic, takes care here to elaborate and draw the conclusion in some detail:

 Let’s be quite clear about the logic of this whole matter of compensation: it is strange enough. The equivalence is provided by the fact that instead of an advantage directly making up for the wrong (so, instead of compensation in money, land or possessions of any kind), a sort of pleasure is given to the creditor as repayment and compensation, – the pleasure of having the right to exercise power over the powerless without a thought, the pleasure ‘de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire’, the enjoyment of violating: an enjoyment that is prized all the higher, the lower and baser the position of the creditor in the social scale, and which can easily seem a delicious titbit to him, even a foretaste of higher rank. Through punishment of the debtor, the creditor takes part in the rights of the masters: at last he, too, shares the elevated feeling of being in a position to despise and maltreat someone as an ‘inferior’

– or at least, when the actual power of punishment, of exacting punishment, is already transferred to the ‘authorities’, of seeing the debtor despised and maltreated. So, then, compensation is made up of a warrant for and entitlement to cruelty. (Nietzsche 2007, §II,5)

Cruelty thus originates not in the noble’s power of requital, but in those instances where the base are temporarily allowed to join the noble in exercising that power. This “delicious titbit,” this temporarily “elevated feeling of being in a position to despise and maltreat someone,” is the fons et origo of pleasure in cruelty.
And so let us return to our sadist, playing her part in a theater of cruelty, taking part in what is typically referred to as a scene, enjoying her own “delicious titbit,” savoring the abjection of her subordinate, effecting the conversion of the bottom’s pain to the top’s arousal. Is her “enjoyment of violating” prized precisely because of her low and base position in the social scale? Is sadism, in other words, the ersatz pleasure of the small, the contemptible? And who is the small figure does evil for the pleasure of doing it if not … the fascist? This would hardly be the first time such an elective affinity has been suggested. As Susan Sontag suggested some thirty-five years ago:
  
Between sadomasochism and fascism there is a natural link. ‘Fascism is theater,’ as Genet said. As is sadomasochistic sexuality: to be involved in sadomasochism is to take part in a sexual theater, a staging of sexuality. Regulars of sadomasochistic sex are expert costumers and choreographers as well as performers, in a drama that is all the more exciting because it is forbidden to ordinary people. Sadomasochism is to sex what war is to civil life: the magnificent experience. … The end to which all sexual experience tends, as Bataille insisted in a lifetime of writing, is defilement, blasphemy. To be ‘nice,’ as to be civilized, means being alienated from this savage experience—which is entirely staged. (Sontag 1980, 103-4)


Sontag’s reference to Bataille would bear investigation, since Bataille is both a central figure in this conversation and has been accused, if not of being a fascist, at least of having fascisant tendencies (Wolin 1996, 2004). Certainly in Bataille’s early work, particularly his essay, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (1979), one can hear a certain attraction to fascism as a heterogeneous response to the deadening homogeneity of bourgeois society, though a closer reading of this essay reveals that the Bataille sees the attraction of fascism as a lure and a danger. But it is also Bataille who draws an important distinction between érotisme and sadism:
  
Eroticism [érotisme] always entails a breaking down of established patterns, the patterns, I repeat, of the regulated social order basic to our discontinuous mode of existence as defined and separate individuals. But in eroticism even less than in reproduction our discontinuous existence is not condemned, in spite of de Sade; it is only jolted. It has to be jarred and shaken to its foundations. Continuity is what we are after, but generally only if that continuity which the death of discontinuous beings can alone establish is not the victor in the long run. What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain. De Sade’s aberration exceeds that limit. (Bataille 1986, 18-19)

 The careful reader will have already heard this theme of continuity – muted, fleeting, but there – in Scarry: “the intense feelings across the skin of her body not as her own body but as the intensely feelable presence of her beloved.” Muted, fleeting, there, but immediately misidentified, for we are to conceive of this intensely doubled tactility “not as bodily sensations but as self-displacing, self-transforming objectification” (1985, 166). Why must Scarry disembody these most bodily of sensations? If pain is locked up incommunicably within the sufferer’s body so that to be in the presence of a person in pain is to have doubt, then the intense pleasure of sexuality, somatically mirroring, as it does, intense pain, must be equally incommunicable unless disembodied.
Let us throw the reasoning process into reverse and ask ourselves: to what do we commit when we commit to the proposition that sexual pleasure is embodied, perhaps an archetype of embodiment? We must deny the binary oppositions set up by Scarry. We experience bodily sensations as self-displacing, self-transforming objectification. We experience the intense feelings across the skin of our bodies as the intensely feelable bodily presence of our beloved in our bodies. We commit, in Bataille’s words, to all the continuity our world can sustain. But we cannot stop there, for we must trace this intimacy back to the pain-racked body. Paradigmatically, to be in the presence of such a body is not to experience doubt.  We may take compassion in its most literal sense. There are no walls, there is no bodily enclosure, no doubt about the cry that pierces our cerebral cortex and alters it (Swain and Lorberbaum 2008). The pain of another is also intensely and bodily feelable. Terrifyingly, this commits us as well to the proposition that the torturer is neither stupid nor in doubt. The torturer knows.
As the torturer knows, so does the sadist; knows, feels her partners pain, and takes pleasure in it, with the distinction that the torturer aims to destroy a world while the sadist and her partner intend to explore a world. The metaphors “power exchange” or “energy flow”, endlessly repeated by practitioners, nonetheless call attention to Bataillean continuity, all the continuity they can sustain.


“Whose dogged strength alone”

But let us not end with a vindication of sadomasochism, but instead call attention to an as-yet-uncorrected error, one shared with Scarry. As Douglass and Wilderson (2013) note, “Scarry worked at the site of deracination: the injured body, the body in pain, pain beyond words—pain as that phenomenon for which there are no words” (p. 120). Yet this injured body is framed by two whole bodies: the integrated relational body which precedes it and the body which may yet be made whole afterward (p. 121). Contrast this body with the black body portrayed by W. E. B. Du Bois:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois 1997, 38)

 But is that dark body invariably invested with the strength not to be torn asunder? DuBois here must be taken as providing an injunction to strength, to bear up under the weight that might tear one asunder. Drawing on the unpublished work of John Murillo, Douglass and Wilderson suggest that fragmentation rather than metaphysical presence is in fact the normal state of the black body. “There can be no temporal or spatial coordinates that mark metaphysical plenitude; no space and time of memory; no life to remember. … [T]he fragmenting process the black psyche undergoes is beyond the ‘event horizon,’ unlike Scarry’s subject whose event horizon is the episode(s) of torture” (2013, p. 121) While Douglass and Wilderson focus on the disintegrative effects of systematic recognition and violence both symbolic and real on the African-American psyche, one cannot fail to recognize that, usually to a lesser degree, the fragmented psyche subject to violence is far from anomalous. The comfortably situated, verbally adept, empowered self whose voice seamlessly cathects body and world is surely a limiting case, not the norm.

We cannot, then, expect the real world of sadomasochism (or the extraordinarily varied world of practices with which it is networked) to seamlessly enact a new and pristine form of cathexis. On the contrary, such practices can eventuate in brutal sexual violence (e.g., Hussain 2015, Schmadeke 2015, Sobol 2015). The world may be able to sustain far more continuity than one’s world. What might it mean to jar, to jolt, to shake a discontinuous existence to its foundations without falling into “de Sade’s aberration”? The answer is surely not the normalization of sadomasochism, bdsm, or any other set of stigmatized practices. While the impulse to avoid stigma is understandable, there is no salvation in the fiction of the whole self, the relationally integrated body, free of stigmata. Nor will gender and hierarchical binaries be overturned by the proliferation of new binary systems: top or bottom, vanilla or kinked, dom or sub, slave or master, sadist or masochist, daddy or boy, with the occasional intermediate category (switch) thrown in to catch those who don’t quite fit. Nor will discontinuous foundations be shaken if those binaries are instantiated through choreographed “scenes” in which everyone knows who they are throughout the interaction, rather than encounters that bracket all identities, binary or otherwise, and make room for emergent and fluid properties.

We have traveled far from Scarry’s world, circuitously, but the path can be retraced simply. Rejecting at the outset the proposition that pain is sheerly aversive, we found ourselves confronted with a range of pain-incorporating practices, none of them sheerly aversive, all of them entailing a body open to pain. In at least some cases, pain is intrinsic to the practice, not a mere by-product. Being led later to reject the proposition that to be in the presence of another’s pain is to be in a state of doubt, we uncovered a new potential cathexis of body, self, and world, mediated not by language but by sensation. That cathexis is no panacea. At its worst, it can tip over into the unmaking of the world, as Scarry warns. It nonetheless may open one path to “a different economy of bodies and pleasures” (Foucault 1990, 159).


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