380 RüdigerKunow
Another variant of this language-critical position, one charged in
addition with ethico-political considerations of great weight, is the
assumption, discussed above in the introduction to this book chapter,
that even the mere attempt at giving artistic representation to human
anguish is tantamount to falsifying, even diminishing, it. Adorno is
probably the person most often identified with this position, and his
sometimes magisterial injunctions against representation in the shadow
of the Shoah—most famously in his (much misquoted) ban against
poetry after Auschwitz (referred to in hisNegativeDialectics361)have
drawnmuchcritique.Thereisnooccasionheretoengagethisdebatein
all its complexity. It remains, however, an important backdrop against
which the following argument will unfold, important, because it can
serve as a reminder of how much is at stake in the age-old antagonism
between pre-verbal somatic experience and semantic systems—nothing
less than the powers of (linguistic)mimesisvis-à-vis the contingencies
ofhumanlifeinitsextreme,precariousforms.
Thequestionofmimesisalsosurfacesandisoftenexpresslyinvoked
in everyday communication about pain experiences. People tend to say
that a body (their own or somebody else's) shows traces or marks of
suffering.Suchafaçonàparlerrestsontheassumptionthatthebodyin
orwithpaindoesspeak,thatthevariousphysiologicalstatesdesignated
by"pain"orrelatedtermsdoindeedsignify,thattheyleaveamark,their
mark (?) on the body's surface. This problem area inserts the somatics-
semanticsrelationintoanoutside-inside,surface-depthframework.
In the medical context, bodily marks serve as entry points for
medical intervention, as guiding lines for strategies of therapy which
ideally will then make these traces go away. Here, the marks of pain
functionassymptomaticsignifiers,openingthewayforaninvestigation
of the conditions which caused them.^78 Not all marks go away, though,
some, for example scars, are indelible traces of the presence of pain
on/in/withthebody.
The symptomatology of pain, in which pain figures as cipher for
something larger beyond itself, has long been striking a sympathetic
(^78) This parallelism with practices of textual interpretation is highlighted in
Carmen Birkle's argument, based on the premises of the Medical Humanities
that in dealing with such symptomatic material "the doctor becomes a literary
critic..."(xii).