Abstract
Scarry’s (The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford, New York, 1985) broke crucial ground in examining the antagonisms between pain, embodiment and language, and the isolating effects of pain as experience. This paper submits Scarry’s claim that extreme pain destroys language, evades mediation, and isolates the subject to critical scrutiny, arguing instead that pain is a semiosomatic force, a form of feeling generated by imperative information about embodiment (real or imaginary) that works to disarticulate and move the subject and the social environment. Pain is not predominantly antagonistic to language; rather, pain insists on signifying, with language being only one of its performative media. What pain resists is representation, not the informational force exerted through language and other semiotic forms. Rather than unmaking language, pain disarticulates and rearticulates subjectivity, refashioning interrelations between the body, subjectivity, others, and culture in ongoing processes of largely aversive impingement, embroiling subjectivity with the imperative directives of embodied vulnerability.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge.
Améry, J. (1964/1998) At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. S. and S. P. Rosenfeld (trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Austin, J.L. (1962/1975) How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bending, L. (2006) Approximation, suggestion, and analogy: Translating pain into language. The Yearbook of English Studies 36(1): 131–137.
Burkitt, I. (2014) Emotions and Social Relations. New York: Sage.
Cromby, J. (2015) Feeling Bodies: Embodying Psychology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
De Saussure, F. (1916/1998) Course in General Linguistics. R. Harris (trans.). Chicago: Open Court.
Derrida, J. (1974/1998) Of Grammatology. G.C. Spivak (trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Fassin, D. and Rechtman, R. (2009) The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. R. Gomme (trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Foucault, M. (1997) Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. D. Macey (trans.). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.
Freud, S. (1990/1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. J. Strachey (trans.). New York: Norton.
Gallese, V. (2001) The “shared manifold” hypothesis. From mirror neurons to empathy. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(5–7): 33–50.
Gallese, V. (2007) Intentional attunement: Mirror neurons and the neural underpinnings of interpersonal relations. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 55(1): 131–175.
Goubert, L., Craig, K.D., Vervoort T., Morley, S., Sullivan M. J.L., de Williams A.C., Cano, A. and Crombez, G. (2005) Facing others in pain: The effects of empathy. Pain 118: 285–288.
Harpham, G.G. (2001) Elaine scarry and the dream of pain. Salmagundi 130/131: 202–234.
Hochschild, A.R. (1979) Emotion work, feeling rules and social structure. American Journal of Sociology 85(3): 551–575.
Iacoboni, M. (2009) Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others. New York: Picador.
Jackson, P.L., Meltzoff, A.N. and Decety, J. (2005) How do we perceive the pain of others? A window into the neural processes involved in empathy. NeuroImage 24(3): 771–779. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2004.09.006.
Johnston, A. and Malabou, C. (2013). Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kaplan, T. (2002) Reversing the shame and gendering the memory. Signs 28(1): 179–199.
Keysers, C. (2011) The Empathic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes our Understanding of Human Nature. Amsterdam: Social Brain Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962/2011) Phenomenology of Perception. C. Smith (trans.). New York: Routledge.
Milton, J. (1667/1998) Paradise Lost. New York: Longman.
Morrison, I., Lloyd, D., di Pellegrino, G. and Roberts, N. (2004) Vicarious responses to pain in anterior cingulate cortex: Is empathy a multisensory issue? Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience 4(2): 270–278.
Pheifer, J.H. and Dapretto, M. (2011) “Mirror, mirror in my mind”: Empathy, interpersonal competence and the mirror neuron system. In: J. Decety and W. Ickes (eds.) The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, pp. 183–198.
Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2009) The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic.
Solms, M. and O. Turnbull. (2002) The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience. New York: Other Press.
Wailoo, K. (2014) Pain: A Political History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wall, P. (2000) Pain: The Science of Suffering. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wilkinson, I. (2005) Pain: A Sociological Introduction. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Williams, R. (2005) Culture and Materialism. London: Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Larocco, S. Pain as semiosomatic force: The disarticulation and rearticulation of subjectivity. Subjectivity 9, 343–362 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0009-3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0009-3