Power from indirect pain: a historical phenomenology of medical pain management
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Power from indirect pain: a historical phenomenology of medical pain management Domonkos Sik1 Accepted: 12 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The article aims at reconstructing how pain is used in contemporary societies in the process of engraving power. Firstly, a social phenomenological analysis of pain is conducted: Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s ideas are used for clarifying the experience of pain itself; Elaine Scarry’s analyses are overviewed in order to reconstruct how pain contributes to the establishing of power. Secondly, this complex approach is applied in early modern context: the parallel processes of the decline of a transcendental and the emergence of a medical interpretation of pain is introduced, along with the marginalization of violence. Thirdly, the era characterized by the triumph of medical pain management is analysed: it is argued that the constitutive role of pain in establishing power does not cease to exist with the emergence of technologies of discursive governance (Foucault); it is an open question, what sort of power is engraved through pain understood in strictly medical frames. Keywords Pain · Phenomenology · Biopower · Early modernity · Late modernity · Medicalization Physical pain is one of the most elementary human experiences. On the one hand, it is a physiological state of the body; on the other hand, an unignorable impression demanding interpretation. Such dual nature locates pain at the borderland of the biological and the cultural.1 Due to its uncomfortable or in some cases unbearable impact, every society develops ways to deal with it. These include interpretative frameworks (describing its origins), technologies of treatment and moral economies (defining the related normative order). However, pain is not only a pre-given phenomenon originating from external sources implying counter-measures. It is also 1
Schleifer (2014, p. 54).
* Domonkos Sik [email protected] 1
Department of Social Theory, University of Eötvös Loránd, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/a, Budapest 1117, Hungary
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evoked and used intentionally by social actors. Because of its dual nature, it is capable of mediating between the biological and the social: causing pain can destroy and rewrite elementary interpretations of the world, thus reconfiguring social relationships. That is why physical abuse, torture and war are considered to be the idealtypical instruments of establishing social hierarchies.2 A painful sensation, which is caused by another subject not only destroys the meanings of the sufferer, it also creates the experience of subordination, as the one causing the pain also has the power of stopping it. The one who hurts not only eliminates the validity of the lifeworld, but also appears as an authority of giving new sense to the world. Accordingly, the history of pain has at least two dimensions: it includes the interpretations and technologies of treatment, also the various ways of causing pain for the sake of establishing power. Furthermore, these dimensions
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