La douleur n'est pas mon fort ...
Sitting here, with toothache, waiting to see the dentist, one recalls the line by Ernst Jünger with which Byung-Chul Han opens his new study: "Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!" [1]
Well, my relation to pain is a mixture of indifference and irritation. I don't share the universal algophobia that characterises our society today, but, unlike many artists and intellectuals, neither do I fetishise pain or regard suffering as the most crucial aspect of life.
Thus, whilst I have a relatively high pain tolerance level and very rarely resort to painkillers, I don't think that this makes courageous or morally superior to those who reach for the paracetamol at the earliest opportunity and opt for drug-induced relief.
Pain, says Han, purifies. By which he means it has a cathartic effect. It should thus be recognised as a genuine passion. Which sounds suspiciously Christian to me and I remember Lawrence's remark made in a letter: "Jesus becomes more unsympatisch to me, the longer I live: crosses and nails and tears and all that stuff! I think he showed us into a nice cul de sac." [2]
Lawrence's view contrasts nicely with the remark by Walter Benjamin which Han chose as an epigraph
for The Palliative Society:
"Of all the corporeal feelings, pain alone is like a
navigable river which never dries up and which leads man down to the
sea. Pleasure, in contrast, turns out to be a dead end, wherever man
tries to follow its lead." [3]
This characterisation of pleasure as a dead end and affirmation of pain is simply a form of ascetic idealism, is it not? Again, far it be from me to reify pleasure, but I think we might challenge the idea that when pain is suppressed, happiness is attenuated and becomes merely a form of dull contentment. Or that those who are "unreceptive to pain close themselves off from deep happiness" [4].
It may be Nietzschean to think like this - to give pain metaphysical significance and project it into the symbolic order (to speak of the art of suffering, etc.) - but when a tooth is troublesome who really cares about what this might (or might not) mean? At such times, we all rub our jaw and fall silent like Monsieur Teste ... [5]
Notes
[1] Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2021), p. 1. Han is quoting from Ernst Jünger's On Pain, (Telos Press, 2008), p. 32.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 322. Letter number 3516 [26 Oct 1925], to John Middleton Murry.
[3] Walter Benjamin, 'Outline of the Psychological Problem', Selected Writings, Vol. 1, (Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 397.
[4] Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society, p. 13.
[5] With reference to the figure of Monsieur Teste, Byung-Chul Han writes:
"Paul Valéry's Monsieur Teste represents the modern, sensitive bourgeois subject who experiences pain as meaningless, as purely physical agony. He has completely lost the Christian narrative [...] and thus also the ability to alleviate pain symbolically. [...]
For Monsieur Teste, pain cannot be narrated. It destroys language. Where the pain begins, his sentences break off. [...]
Confronted with pain, Monsieur Teste falls silent. Pain robs him of his language. It destroys his world, traps him in his mute body." [19-20]
For another brief note on pain and the palliative society, click here.
