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privatizingunderstandingsofpain,becausetheyextendWesternnotions
ofselfhoodandindividualismevenintopathologicalstatesofembodied
selfhood. I will return to this issue later and here follow up on the
specialrelationshipbetweenpainandsubjecthood.
ThefirstthingtosayhereisthatinScarry's,Morris'sandmanyother
similar arguments, there is a shared conceptual logic at work which
connects such subjectifications of pain with positions articulated by
philosophers in the existentialist tradition, here broadly defined. These
often cast extreme human anguish as representative of theconditio
humana, attimeseventhehumanconditioninitspre-semanticstage,as
an expression of "primary, pre-reflexive body-consciousness"
(Shusterman 53-55, with reference to Merleau-Ponty). My principal
example for this tradition of thinking which underwrites
conceptualizations of pain by existentialists otherwise as different as
Heidegger or Sartre or phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty is the
German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. A few months before his
death,in hislastpublic appearance,Gadamer,echoingthemediavitain
mortesumus-m otifknownfromMedievalChristianity,hadthistosay:
we are in pain and cannot part from pain. Pain encompasses as it were
our whole life and challenges us constantly, ever again.... [from] the
first cry of pain of the newly born child [to] the more 'silent' but
recurrent pains of senescentafflictions—we are in pain and cannot part
from it. Pain encompasses our lives and poses a trial for us that will
neverend.Painisdemandingalotfromus.(Schmerz27;mytrans.).Mediavitaindoloresumus. Human beings in this view are not only
constantly but inextricably "in" pain; and this existential link compels
them to develop a particular relationship toward their anguish because
both pain and our relationship to it are paradigmatic of human life in
generalasanendowmentandacommission(Gadamerrepeatedlycallsit
"Aufgabe").^80 Not the possible avoidance of pain (recommended by
(^80) This idea of embodiment as commission re-appears in a different context
where it is linked to ethical questions of self-conduct. Under the banner of
"biological citizenship" (Rose,Politics of Life24) it becomes an individual