RETHINKING THE BODY IN PAIN

Abstract
This article calls into question two core suppositions of The Body in
Pain: that pain is sheerly aversive; and, that those who inflict pain do
so unawares. I argue that these pieties avoid disturbing questions
regarding the pain-filled body. The controlled experience of pain is
central to any number of practices; many of them place the body in
extremis. Conversely, there are practices of pain-infliction undertaken
with the expectation of gratification or social validation. Pain, in short,
is alluring as well as aversive. That allure found not to be dismissible
as pathological, but one response to a world that is always already
unmade.

Keywords: Scarry, Bataille, pain, torture, sadomasochism, BDSM

Elaine Scarrys The Body in Pain (1985) has been a stunning academic
success story. Continuously in print for nearly thirty years, it still
ranks among Amazons (2015) top ten sellers in literary theory and
counts over six thousand academic citations (Google Scholar, 2015).
Reviewed upon its release by prominent public intellectuals in New
Republic (Ignatieff, 1985), Commonweal (Wyschogrod, 1986), TLS
(Byatt, 1986), New York Times Book Review (Suleiman, 1986), New

2
York Review of Books (Singer, 1986), and London Review of Books
(Shklar, 1986), it has nonetheless not been the subject of systematic
retrospective until now. While it has proved unusually fertile as a
source of fresh thinking, few have extensively engaged its
philosophical argument, Moyn (2013) being one notable exception.
While not an extended engagement, this paper seeks to describe
the philosophical core of Scarrys argument and critique it on home
ground. Scarry proposes that the self is constructed through the
linguistic cathexis between body and world; pain destroys that
cathexis and therefore destroys the self. There is a great deal to be
said in favor of this core argument and no attempt will be made here
to overturn it. It will be suggested, however, that Scarry makes a
signal error at the beginning of her argument when she suggests that
pain is sheerly aversive (1985, p.52). A more complicated
phenomenology of pain will be suggested in its place, and some of its
consequences explored.

The argument restated

Pain, according to Scarry, has a dual face. The one who suffers pain
cannot fail to know that she is in pain. Because pain is felt solely by
the sufferer and resists expression in language, however, the
sufferers pain is not nearly so readily confirmable for others. [P]ain
comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be

3
denied and that which cannot be confirmed (Scarry 1985, p.4). Pain
is therefore multiply isolating. Our linguistic resources for its
expression are scant. Pain reduces language to a cry. Unlike other
states, pain has no external object; it locks the sufferer up inside the
body that hurts her (pp.4-5). In this isolation,

[i]ntense pain destroys a person's self and world, a

destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction
of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body
or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe. Intense
pain is also language-destroying: as the content of one's
world disintegrates, so the content of one's language
disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so that which
would express and project the self is robbed of its source
and its subject. Word, self, and voice are lost, or nearly
lost. (p.35)

In a second moment, Scarry takes up the political implications

of pains near-inexpressibility, taking torture to be the institution that
makes starkest these implications. In torture, the sufferer feels pain
with unbearable acuteness, while the torturer not only does not feel
the pain, he can be in the presence of another person in pain and not
know it - not know it to the point where he himself inflicts it and goes

4
on inflicting it (p.12). But torture, in an institutional context, is not an
isolated encounter between a victim and a sadist. Institutionalized
torture, widespread both geographically and temporally, has an
identifiable structure. In that structure, the infliction of pain is
invariably paired with imprisonment and interrogation.

Pain and interrogation inevitably occur together in part

because the torturer and the prisoner each experience
them as opposites. The very question that, within the
political pretense, matters so much to the torturer that it
occasions his grotesque brutality will matter so little to
the prisoner experiencing the brutality that he will give
the answer. (p.29)

In a bizarre inversion, the prisoners answer is coded as

betrayal, a coding made possible by pains imperceptibility. By
intensifying the prisoners experience of pain, the torturer severs her
connection to everything outside her body, reducing her to nothing
more than a body with nothing left to betray.

Just as the interrogation, like the pain, is a way of

wounding, so the pain, like the interrogation, is a vehicle
of self-betrayal. Torture systematically prevents the

5
prisoner from being the agent of anything and
simultaneously pretends that he is the agent of some
things. Despite the fact that in reality he has been
deprived of all control over, and therefore all
responsibility for, his world, his words, and his body, he is
to understand his confession as it will be understood by
others, as an act of self-betrayal. (pp.46-7)

The language-game in which the word betrayal is ordinarily

and unproblematically used has here been replaced by one in which
the word no longer has a legitimate use (at least insofar as it refers to
the agency of the prisoner). By eliding the two language-games,
though, the regime is able to shift the moral opprobrium of torture, at
least partially, onto the prisoner who betrays rather than the jailor
who tortures.
Torture is institutionalized, moreover, not simply in the iterated
pantomime of the interrogation. Torture becomes the central
performative act in this theater of power. Just as the torturer reduces
the voice of the tortured to a cry, the regime that tortures bids to
reduce all competing voices to silence. Perversely, bringing torture to
public attention can reinforce the regimes power. Since pain can
barely be expressed directly, she who wishes to bring torture into
public view must usually resort to a language of agency focusing on

6
the wounded prisoner or, more often, the instruments of torture
(p.16). This language of agency, however, is chronically unstable, for
instruments of torture, weapons, can also be deployed as insignia of
power.

As an actual physical fact, a weapon is an object that goes

into the body and produces pain. As a perceptual fact, it
lifts the pain out of the body and makes it visible or, more
precisely, it acts as a bridge or mechanism across which
some of pain's attributes - its incontestable reality, its
totality, its ability to eclipse all else, its power of dramatic
alteration and world dissolution - can be lifted away from
their source, can be separated from the sufferer and
referred to power, broken off from the body and separated
from the sufferer and referred to power, broken off from
the body and attached instead to the regime. Now, at
least for the duration of this obscene and pathetic drama,
it is not the pain but the regime that is incontestably real,
not pain but the regime that is total, not pain but the
regime that is able to eclipse all else, not pain but the
regime that is able to dissolve the world. Fraudulent and
merciless, this kind of power claims pain's attributes as its
own and disclaims the pain itself. (pp.56-7)

The result is a self-enclosed fiction of power in which the

incontestable reality of the prisoners pain is lifted out of the
prisoners body and conferred onto the regime. It is not enough to
make torture visible. It must be made visible in a way that brings to
attention the regimes unbearability rather than its power. One can
see the difficulties entailed in a singularly well-known counter-theater,
the weekly vigils on behalf of the disappeared held by the Madres de
la Plaza del Mayo in Buenos Aires. This theater was carefully staged
for maximum visibility, in the citys busiest square during its busiest
time. The immediate result of this staging was an evacuation of the
stage as porteos fled or avoided this square at the appointed hour.
The first act of this drama brought the collective consciousness of
torture and disappearance under Argentinas military regime from a
passive state of not caring to know to an active state of taking care
not to know, because being seen to know brought one far too close to
the regimes power to inflict pain. In retrospect, we know that this
state of active not-knowing was not the last act in the play, but the
course of the drama shows us that visibility is not a simple counter to
torture.

Pain reconsidered

8
In Scarrys lengthily-developed and in many ways perceptive
phenomenology of pain, the essential error is to be found in the first
step, and the one that seems least subject to objection:

The first, most essential aspect of pain is its sheer

aversiveness. If to the person in pain it does not feel
averse, and if it does not in turn elicit in that person
aversive feelings toward it, it is not in either philosophical
or psychological definitions of it called pain. (p. 52)

Contrast this view of pain as sheer aversiveness with the wide

range of common human activities that often entail pain: exercise,
sport, dance, martial arts, motorcycle riding, skydiving, body
modification, eating highly spiced food, consumption of tobacco,
alcohol, or any number of controlled substances, some forms of
meditative practice, labor (whether work or childbirth), depilation,
plastic surgery, listening to loud music, long periods of restricted
mobility (during gaming, writing, or other sedentary activities), even
the dragging of heavy bags and endurance of uncomfortable chairs
during academic conferences.
In many of these practices pain is not merely endured as a
regrettable but necessary side-effect on the road to some valued goal;
pain is cultivated as an intrinsic part of the activity. Dancers who go

9
en pointe are told to embrace the pain. Long-distance runners wear
t-shirts reading my sport is your sports punishment. Rugby players
sport bumper stickers reading, Give blood, play rugby. A tattoo or a
piercing is valued, at least in part, because of, not in spite of, the pain
entailed in acquiring it. Ghost peppers are eaten for the pain, not for
the taste. Cigarettes, motorcycles, skydiving lure with the frisson of
danger. In which world do people live lives devoted to the avoidance
of physical pain?
The same problem reemerges in Scarrys much briefer
discussion of pleasure, which she identifies with either the absence
of pain or a bodily state in which something other than the body is
experienced (p.355 n.6). For Scarry, even the most intimate bodily
pleasures are finally identified with disembodiment.

[I]f a thorn cuts through the skin of the womans finger,

she feels not the thorn but her body hurting her. If
instead she experiences across the skin of her fingers not
the awareness of the awareness of the feel of those fingers
but the feel of the fine weave of another womans work, or
if she traces the lettering of an engraved message and
becomes mindful not of events in her hands but of the
form and motivating force of the signs, or if that night she
experiences the intense feelings across the skin of her

10
body not as her own body but as the intensely feelable
presence of her beloved, she in each of these moments
experiences the sensation of touch not as bodily
sensations but as self-displacing, self-transforming
objectification; and so far are these moments from
physical pain, that if they are named as bodily occurrences
at al, they will be called pleasure, a word usually
reserved either for moments of overt disembodiment or, as
here, moments when acute bodily sensations are
experienced as something other than ones own body.
(p.166)

This must be among the most anemic descriptions of embodied

pleasure imaginable. Bodily pleasure must be understood as having
positive content, not merely the negative content of pains absence.
Pleasure, then, cannot be a simple opposite of pain. To better tease
out the relationship between pain and pleasure, consider two nearsynonyms of each that can be treated as simple opposites: discomfort
and comfort. Comfort can readily be used to denote the absence of
pain, just as discomfort can be used to denote slight pain, or as a
euphemism for more severe pain. Correlatively, pain can readily be
used to mean extreme discomfort, but one would not ordinarily use
pleasure to mean extreme comfort. Very roughly, it may be said

11
that we use comfort to refer to decreased stimulation of the brains
aversion system and pleasure to refer to increased stimulation of
the brains reward systems (Scitovsky, 1992, p. 59).
The presentation of pleasure and pain as stark binary
alternatives oversimplifies both states, offering a false dichotomy that
is not consistent with common and everyday experiences.
Pleasure as mere avoidance of pain is, in the first instance,
unattainable and counterproductive. A sedentary life, a life that
avoids the discomfort of physical exertion, leads ineluctably to loss of
flexibility, loss of muscle mass, loss of anaerobic capacity, and the
chronic pain that attends this loss. But many if not most kinds of
bodily pleasure require some kind of physical exertion, exertion that
at a minimum entails discomfort and frequently pain. Any
engagement in sport, for example, requires the first, and any serious
training for sport requires the second. Sport and like activities
require a relationship to pain that includes acceptance, management,
control, endurance, and pleasure in the counterposition of pain and
pains cessation. Pain itself may be sought as a limit experience, a
gateway to forms of consciousness not usually attained. Indeed, that
form of consciousness may be precisely an escape from the languagemediated world that Scarry sees as constitutive of self. One need not
deny a self-constitutive linguistic cathexis between body and world in
order to recognize that the relationship of self to language can also be

12
experienced as an endlessly self-referential loop, a prison-house from
which intense embodiment can be sought as a form of escape.
In these intense forms of embodiment, the line between
pleasure and pain is by no means entirely clear. Consider the
phenomenon of a second wind, a point when the discomfort involved
in intense physical exertion turns into a more pleasurable experience.
Does all discomfort disappear at that point? Certainly not, nor in the
course of training does one experience a single threshold after which
all exertion becomes easy. Rather, one encounters multiple
thresholds, both within a single training session and over a course of
training. Pain and pleasure are experienced as a complex flow, not as
rival states with a switch thrown that transforms one into the other,
because the brains aversion and reward systems are not so neatly
separable as the very rough distinction sketched above suggests.
Excessive stimulus of the reward systems becomes aversive, but there
is no simple change of state between the two. Rather, stimulus of the
aversive system begins while stimulus of the reward systems is still
increasing, so that aversion and reward are felt simultaneously. Only
later does stimulus become so extreme that the reward systems are
shut out (Scitovsky 1992, 60).
Similarly, intense sexual arousal, a bodily state normally
associated with pleasure, can become so intense that it becomes
aversive, or even painful. Once again, there is no simple transition

13
between one state and the other. Sexual arousal can be experienced
as painful and pleasurable, desirable and aversive, simultaneously.
Orgasm, a bodily state sometimes seen as the epitome of bodily
pleasure, shares more than a little with Scarrys phenomenology of
pain. It renders ones bodily sensations overwhelmingly present while
shutting out much of the external world. It reduces language to a cry.
It has no external object. [P]hysical pain Scarry argues, unlike
any other state of consciousnesshas no referential content. It is not
of or for anything (1985, p. 5). But sexual climax is also a state that
is not of or for anything, even when experienced in the intimate
company of another. The obvious distinction, of course, is that pain is
paradigmatically (though, as we have seen, not universally) tied to the
aversion system while orgasm is paradigmatically tied to the reward
systems, at least up to the point of excessive stimulus. The structural
similarities in the somatic experiences of this form of intense pleasure
and intense pain, though, indicate that an overly facile opposition of
the two is not to be hastily embraced.
As a counterpoint, consider the gustatory systems relationship
to the reward and aversion systems. Of the four basic tastes sweet,
sour, salt, and bitter sweetness dominates the reward system. At
moderate concentrations, sweetness correlates with the highest levels
of gustatory pleasure, pleasure that declines only slightly at much
higher concentrations. The pleasures associated with the other three

14
tastes peak at lower concentrations, are much less pleasurable at
those peaks, and decline rapidly into intensely unpleasant experience
at higher concentrations (Rozin, 1999). The palate, it might be said, is
primed to favor sweets. A palate that always favors sweets, however,
is said to be childish or undeveloped. A developed palate integrates
odor and taste and seeks complex combinations that stimulate the
aversion system as well as the reward systems. One might think of a
sexual palate in a similar way, with stimulation of the reward systems
to easy climax characteristic of an undeveloped palate and full
exploration of the flavors that combine stimulation of the aversion
system and reward systems characteristic of mature, sophisticated,
sexual taste.

Pathology, fascism, continuity

What has been tendentiously termed here a mature, sophisticated,
sexual taste is more conventionally denominated masochism, still
classified along with sadism and sadomasochism as clinical
paraphilias. DSM-5 recognizes sexual sadism disorder and sexual
masochism disorder as paraphilic disorders if people with these
disorders feel personal distress about their interest, not merely
stress resulting from societys disapproval; or have a sexual desire
that involves another persons psychological distress, injury, or death,
or a desire for sexual behaviors involving unwilling persons or persons

15
unable to give legal consent (American Psychiatric Association,
2013). These carefully worded exceptions to the pathologization of
masochism and sadism were the result of intense controversy
between those who argued for continued clinical diagnoses and those
who argued for the depathologization of these practices (Wakefield,
2011). The compromise struck, while applying equally to all
paraphilic disorders, in fact introduces a marked distinction between
sexual masochism disorder and sexual sadism disorder, since
masochistic sexual desire never includes another persons
psychological distress [or] injury, while sadistic sexual desire, at least
arguably, always does.
The relationship of the sadist to pain is not entirely like that of
the masochist. The masochist experiences both the interplay of pain
and pleasure and the sadists somatic and affective response to her
pain and pleasure, while the sadist experiences only the masochists
somatic and affective response. The sadists experience, then, lies not
only in continuum with those who experience the interplay of pain and
pleasure in non-eroticized contexts, but also with those who enjoy the
discomforting power bestowed on them by a relationship of authority
(or perhaps, in some cases, brute power): the teacher, the coach, the
trainer, the judge, the bureaucrat, the priest and a raft of others who
are authorized to compel obedience.

16
Authority to compel obedience can be exercised benignly,
though even its benign exercise typically entails difficulty or
discomfort for those expected to obey. At the limit, one finds those
who exercise such authority for the sheer pleasure of making
compliance difficult. This non-benign exercise of authority is
frequently, and not inaccurately, characterized as sadistic. Scarry
(1985) argues that the torturer must be stupid, must not know what
she is doing, must fail to perceive the pain of the tortured in order to
do her work. But on this reading the sadist may draw satisfaction
from not only perception but often heightened and intimate
perception of the others pain. This opens the possibility that some
torturers are not stupid, but sadists who accomplish their work in full
knowledge of what they do. We must, then, place sadism under a
scrutiny that we would not necessarily attach to masochism. What
does the sadist gain from such an interaction, and does her pleasure
in such an interaction stand of a piece with the pleasure gained from
other kinds of exercise of authority?
Let us consider the Nietzschean possibility that one root of the
sadists pleasure lies in the pleasure that comes from the power of
requital. In a section of Human, All Too Human titled Dual
prehistory of good and evil, Nietzsche posits two rival sources of the
distinction between good and bad: first of all, namely, in the soul of
the ruling tribes and castes. Whoever has the power to requite good

17
with good, evil with evil, and who really engages in requital and is
therefore grateful and vengeful, is called good; whoever is powerless
and cannot engage in requital is considered bad (Nietzsche 1995,
45). Here the distinction is not between good and evil, because the
good requite evil with evil. Good is instead contrasted with
contemptibility, powerlessness, abjection. The counterposition of
good to evil, in contrast, lies in the soul of the oppressed, powerless
person who considers every other person to be hostile,
inconsiderate, exploitative, cruel, crafty, whether he is noble or base
(Nietzsche 1995, 45).
The power of requital, however, need not be a license for
cruelty. What makes it thus? Nietzsche finds the root of cruelty not in
the relationship of the noble to the vile, but in the commercial realm
of contracts, of legal recourse for the breaking of contractual
promises. Precisely here, promises are made; precisely here, the
person making the promise has to have a memory made for him:
precisely here, we may suppose, is a repository of hard, cruel, painful
things (Nietzsche 2007, II,5). In an instance reminiscent of The
Merchant of Venice, Nietzsche takes as his paradigmatic example of
cruelty the creditors cutting as much flesh as seemed appropriate
from the defaulting debtor. Nietzsche, so often aphoristic, takes care
here to elaborate and draw the conclusion in some detail:

18
Lets be quite clear about the logic of this whole matter of
compensation: it is strange enough. The equivalence is
provided by the fact that instead of an advantage directly
making up for the wrong (so, instead of compensation in
money, land or possessions of any kind), a sort of pleasure
is given to the creditor as repayment and compensation,
the pleasure of having the right to exercise power over the
powerless without a thought, the pleasure de faire le mal
pour le plaisir de le faire, the enjoyment of violating: an
enjoyment that is prized all the higher, the lower and
baser the position of the creditor in the social scale, and
which can easily seem a delicious titbit to him, even a
foretaste of higher rank. Through punishment of the
debtor, the creditor takes part in the rights of the masters:
at last he, too, shares the elevated feeling of being in a
position to despise and maltreat someone as an inferior
or at least, when the actual power of punishment, of
exacting punishment, is already transferred to the
authorities, of seeing the debtor despised and
maltreated. So, then, compensation is made up of a
warrant for and entitlement to cruelty. (Nietzsche 2007,
II,5)

19
Cruelty thus originates not in the nobles power of requital, but in
those instances where the base are temporarily allowed to join the
noble in exercising that power. This delicious titbit, this temporarily
elevated feeling of being in a position to despise and maltreat
someone, is the fons et origo of pleasure in cruelty.
And so let us return to our sexual sadist, playing her part in a
theater of cruelty, taking part in what is typically referred to as a
scene, enjoying her own delicious titbit, savoring the abjection of
her subordinate, effecting the conversion of the bottoms pain to the
tops arousal. Is her enjoyment of violating prized precisely because
of her low and base position in the social scale? Is sadism, in other
words, the ersatz pleasure of the small, the contemptible? And who is
the small figure qui fait le mal pour le plaisir de le faire if not the
fascist? This would not be the first time such an elective affinity has
been suggested. As Susan Sontag suggested some thirty-five years
ago:

Between sadomasochism and fascism there is a natural

link. Fascism is theater, as Genet said. As is
sadomasochistic sexuality: to be involved in
sadomasochism is to take part in a sexual theater, a
staging of sexuality. Regulars of sadomasochistic sex are
expert costumers and choreographers as well as

20
performers, in a drama that is all the more exciting
because it is forbidden to ordinary people.
Sadomasochism is to sex what war is to civil life: the
magnificent experience. The end to which all sexual
experience tends, as Bataille insisted in a lifetime of
writing, is defilement, blasphemy. To be nice, as to be
civilized, means being alienated from this savage
experiencewhich is entirely staged. (Sontag, 1980,
pp.103-4)

Sontags reference to Bataille would bear investigation, since

Bataille is both a central figure in this conversation and has been
accused, if not of being a fascist, at least of having fascisant
tendencies (Wolin, 1996, 2004). Certainly in Batailles early work,
particularly his essay, The Psychological Structure of Fascism
(1979), one can hear a certain attraction to fascism as a
heterogeneous response to the deadening homogeneity of bourgeois
society, though a closer reading of this essay reveals that the Bataille
sees the attraction of fascism as a lure and a danger. But it is also
Bataille who draws an important distinction between rotisme and
sadism:

21
Eroticism [rotisme] always entails a breaking down of
established patterns, the patterns, I repeat, of the
regulated social order basic to our discontinuous mode of
existence as defined and separate individuals. But in
eroticism even less than in reproduction our discontinuous
existence is not condemned, in spite of de Sade; it is only
jolted. It has to be jarred and shaken to its foundations.
Continuity is what we are after, but generally only if that
continuity which the death of discontinuous beings can
alone establish is not the victor in the long run. What we
desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all
the continuity such a world can sustain. De Sades
aberration exceeds that limit. (Bataille, 1986, pp.18-19)

The careful reader will have already heard this theme of continuity
muted, fleeting, but there in Scarry: the intense feelings across the
skin of her body not as her own body but as the intensely feelable
presence of her beloved. Muted, fleeting, there, but immediately
misidentified, for we are to conceive of this intensely doubled tactility
not as bodily sensations but as self-displacing, self-transforming
objectification (1985, p.166). Why does Scarry disembody these most
bodily of sensations? If pain is locked up incommunicably within the
sufferers body so that to be in the presence of a person in pain is to

22
have doubt, then the intense pleasure of sexuality, somatically
mirroring as it does intense pain, must be equally incommunicable
unless disembodied.
Let us throw the reasoning process into reverse and ask
ourselves: to what do we commit when we commit to the proposition
that sexual pleasure is embodied, perhaps an archetype of
embodiment? We must deny the binary oppositions set up by Scarry.
We experience bodily sensations as self-displacing, self-transforming
objectification. We experience the intense feelings across the skin of
our bodies as the intensely feelable bodily presence of our beloved in
our bodies. We commit, in Batailles words, to all the continuity our
world can sustain. But we cannot stop there, for we must trace this
intimacy back to the pain-wracked body. Paradigmatically, to be in the
presence of such a body is not to experience doubt. We may take
compassion in its most literal sense. There are no walls, there is no
bodily enclosure, no doubt about the cry that pierces our cerebral
cortex and alters it (Swain and Lorberbaum 2008). The pain of
another is also intensely and bodily feelable. Terrifyingly, this
commits us as well to the proposition that the torturer is neither
stupid nor in doubt. The torturer knows.
As the torturer knows, so does the sadist; knows, feels her
partners pain, and takes pleasure in it, with the distinction that the
torturer aims to destroy a world while the sadist and her partner

23
intend to explore a world. The metaphors power exchange or
energy flow echo that Bataillean continuity, all the continuity they
can sustain.

Whose dogged strength alone

As Douglass and Wilderson (2013) note, Scarry worked at the site of
deracination: the injured body, the body in pain, pain beyond words
pain as that phenomenon for which there are no words (p.120). Yet
this injured body is framed by two whole bodies: the integrated
relational body which precedes it and the body which may yet be
made whole afterward (p.121). Contrast this body with the black
body portrayed by W. E. B. Du Bois:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this

sense of always looking at ones self through the eyes of
others, of measuring ones soul by the tape of a world that
looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his
twonessan American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts,
two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark
body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being
torn asunder. (Du Bois, 1997, p.38)

24
But is that dark body invariably invested with the strength not to be
torn asunder? DuBois here must be taken as providing an injunction
to strength, to bear up under the weight that might tear a psyche
apart. Drawing on the unpublished work of John Murillo, Douglass
and Wilderson suggest that fragmentation rather than metaphysical
presence is in fact the normal state of the black body. There can be
no temporal or spatial coordinates that mark metaphysical plenitude;
no space and time of memory; no life to remember. [T]he
fragmenting process the black psyche undergoes is beyond the event
horizon, unlike Scarrys subject whose event horizon is the episode(s)
of torture (2013, p.121).
While Douglass and Wilderson focus on the African-American
psyche, other psyches also find themselves subject to systematic
misrecognition and violence both symbolic and real: women, people
with a disability, transgender people, prisoners, patients, the aged,
and the list can be extended indefinitely. The comfortably situated,
verbally adept, empowered self whose voice seamlessly cathects body
and world is surely a limiting case, not the norm. Even those lucky
few who approach that limiting case arrive at that position, not
innocent and untouched by the world, but dripping from head to toe,
from every pore, with blood and dirt (Marx, 1976, p. 926). Either
one brings to every encounter a world of hurt, or one blunders

25
forward childishly unconscious of the hurt, system of privilege, and
structural violence on which ones putative wholeness is founded.
We cannot, then, expect the real world of sadomasochism to
seamlessly enact a new and pristine form of cathexis. On the contrary,
such practices can eventuate in brutal sexual violence (e.g., Hussain,
2015, Schmadeke, 2015, Sobol, 2015, Wright, Stambaugh, and Cox,
2015). The world may be able to sustain far more continuity than
ones world. What might it mean to jar, to jolt, to shake a
discontinuous existence to its foundations without falling into de
Sades aberration? The answer is surely not the normalization of
sadomasochism, BDSM, or any other set of stigmatized practices.
While the impulse to avoid stigma is understandable, there is no
salvation in the fiction of the whole self, the relationally integrated
body, free of stigmata. Nor will gender and hierarchical binaries be
overturned by the proliferation of new binary systems: top or bottom,
sadist or masochist, and so on. Nor will discontinuous foundations be
shaken if those binaries are instantiated through choreographed
scenes in which everyone knows who they are throughout the
interaction, rather than encounters that bracket all identities, binary
or otherwise, and make room for emergent and fluid properties.
Those properties may open one path to that different economy of
bodies and pleasures of which Foucault (1990, p.159) famously
spoke.

26
We have traveled far from Scarrys world, circuitously, but the
path can be retraced simply. Rejecting at the outset the proposition
that pain is sheerly aversive, we found ourselves confronted with a
range of pain-incorporating practices, none of them sheerly aversive,
all of them entailing a body open to pain. In at least some cases, pain
is intrinsic to the practice, not a mere by-product. Being led later to
reject the proposition that to be in the presence of anothers pain is to
be in a state of doubt, we uncovered a new potential cathexis of body,
self, and world, mediated not by language but by sensation. That
cathexis is no panacea. At its worst, it can tip over into the unmaking
of the world, as Scarry warns.
Once one accepts, however, that the world in which one finds
oneself is always already unmade, always already in the process of
further unmaking, this cathexis can be seen in a new light. That
cathexis is not a break from a world otherwise fit for habitation, nor a
flight from a world unfit to be lived in. It can be, rather, a path into a
world never yet wholly unmade, a making in the midst of unmaking,
an unmaking as a prelude to remaking. All the continuity that this
world can sustain; who could believe that such a project would be free
of pain?
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