396 RüdigerKunow
This is also the point made by Indian sociologist Veena Das in her
conversations with Cavell: "[when] we begin to think of pain as asking
for acknowledgment and recognition; denial of the other's pain is not
about the failings of the intellect but the failings of the spirit.... [T]he
pain of the other not only asks for a home in language but also seeks a
homeinthebody"(88).
PainasRelationshipandRelation
As I hope to have shown in this chapter, pain and suffering are
moments of intense "somatic awareness" (Shusterman xi, 73), or whatI
earlier called an "emphatic Now" of human embodiment. This peculiar
awareness cannot, however, be fully comprehended when observed
exclusivelyintermsoftheindividualpersonaffected.Paindoesisolate,
ittearsasunderthefabricofhumaninteractionandcommunication,and
thus,intuitively,wedoimagineallformsofhumananguishasinstances
of (negative) residence, a way in which human beings "have" pain
experience or inhabit their corporeality. However, in light of the
foregoing discussion, such an understanding needs to be complicated
because our intuitions cause us to miss out on the important and
multiform cultural work performed in moments of extremeanguish and
distress. Accordingly, the trajectory of my reflections on pain and
suffering has moved from the body-mind-divide via the relations of
body and language and arrived at an interactional understanding of
anguish.
Pain doesnotjustreside,painrelates; it works both vertically, deep
insidehumanbodiesandatthesametime,horizontally,betweenbodies,
aligning people or tearing them apart. Being "in pain" has always been
an intense experience accompanied by equally intense processes which
soughttoalignthesomaticwiththesemantic,embodimentincriseswith
the available cultural archives. In the U.S.-American context, these
archives have been resourced by the ideology of self-help and the
intense reception of Freudian "two-person psychology" (Nakhla and
Jackson152)whichbyandlargetendstogiveprivilegetopsychological
over somatic explanations for corporeal anguish (Gendlin 181-92; 283-
99).
The balance of power between the body in pain and the body in
representation, the somatic and the semantic, is, however, never stable.