The Political Lives of Pain

This paper is a critique of the common-sense view of pain and the role it plays in contemporary political life. I argue that the common-sense understanding of pain as a uniform and universal human experience has insidious political effects. It makes pain recognisable only insofar as the subject-in-pain becomes an object-like container of pain. I show that this feature of the common-sense view reflects a larger contradiction in contemporary politics, whereby subjective testimony is superficially championed, but only in the sense that subjects act as vessels of their own experience and sensations. On the common-sense view, subjects simply ‘have’ pains and those pains are necessarily ‘bad’. Pain is not constituted subjectively, through the subject’s own interpretations of its inner sensations; it is simply the effect of a pathological process in the body that must be stopped. Insofar as subjective interpretations do not matter to the ontological make-up of pain, the subject is effectively reduced to being a container of pain – it contains, but does not interpret, configure or constitute, a given object called pain. I show how this ‘container’ view of the subject pervades and structures the contemporary politics of pain, with self-defeating effects for social justice efforts. From feminists rallying around ‘women’s pain’, white slavery abolitionists purportedly ‘empathising’ with black pain, liberals making promises of the ‘painless good life’, to anti-abortion activists deploying the spectre of foetal pain, pain offers everywhere the temptation of hermeneutic and ontological givenness in this unstable and polarised world – a thing we can at least all agree on is necessarily ‘bad’. I argue that we should resist this temptation, and instead include contestations over the meanings of pain in our struggle over the terms of shared life.