Where Does It Hurt?

“Hesitant to speak of the therapeutic role of art or of sketching out the possibility of a catharsis, art history has featured multiple portrayals of pain without necessarily making it the object of an ethical engagement. Perhaps this is where contemporary art stakes its claim, by producing shapes and images of suffering that don’t forget the care, don’t ignore the trauma, and take the affects of the aesthetic relationship into account.”

Life is full of pain that we have learned to deal with somehow or other. To speak about this pain, if the pain is not ours, is a delicate exercise that requires attention and empathy. Quoting the words of essayist Elaine Scarry, Martine Delvaux emphasizes in the first essay of this issue that while pain is a certainty for those who feel it, it brings up doubt for those hearing of another’s pain. This doubt is manifested in several ways, including being unable to recognize the other’s pain or refusing to validate it or even believe it exists. Although medicine has developed means of measuring pain, such as a pain scale, in situations of chronic pain or psychological trauma, disbelief and even suspicion persist. In part, it is this doubt that we are trying to dispel by carefully looking at pain that is a priori inexpressible and described in these pages as “silent,” “Subterranean,” or “intractable” and that transforms the body, as Joëlle Dubé points out, into a somatic archive.