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{"id":172605,"date":"2022-09-05T19:55:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-06T00:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/?p=172605"},"modified":"2025-10-14T13:54:32","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T18:54:32","slug":"intractable-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/intractable-pain\/","title":{"rendered":"Intractable Pain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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My psychoanalyst gave me this image at a time when my pain was at its worst, just after the Maple Spring and months of protests on the streets of Montr\u00e9al alongside students fighting for a freeze on tuition fees (and more broadly, the right to a future). Sitting in an armchair before him, in agonizing pain, I asked him how I was ever going to keep on writing. Because if the pain continued, I wasn\u2019t going to make it, I\u2019d give up on life. The psychoanalyst\u2019s response: \u201cBe like Frida Kahlo, find a way of working while lying down.\u201d Feeling dejected but coming to grips with the fact that it was that or nothing, I began a routine of writing while lying on the sofa or in bed, standing at the kitchen counter or at a standing desk, a routine of alternating between horizontality and verticality that I have kept up to this day. The pain has become something I live with; it has become my best enemy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
March 2012\u200a\u2014\u200aMarch 2022. Lying in bed with the present essay, I note a decade of chronic pain, of pain that is called \u201cintractable\u201d because medicine isn\u2019t able to control it. Faced with this ongoing, resistant pain, the medical establishment goes quiet, shakes its head, turns its eyes away, and leaves the room. Science bows down, throws up its hands, abandons the sufferer to the power of that which makes them suffer. As I write these lines, Ukraine is on fire and bleeding, the dead are piling up, as is the evidence of torture, murder, and rape used as instruments of war. All the brutalized bodies are shown in newspapers and on TV, presented to the United Nations and to the populace of Europe and North America as proof of the horror and as pleas: \u201cPlease, help us,\u201d the Ukrainian president keeps repeating on behalf of his citizens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
* * *<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
I reread Susan Sontag\u2019s pages on images of war in Regarding the Pain of Others<\/em>. Is art not engaged in \u201cmaking pain visible\u201d? If the pain is unspeakable and impossible to convey through the spoken or written word, what about the image? If public images of bodies, tortured or murdered for imperialistic or even genocidal purposes, are able to disturb and scandalize us, what about art practices that represent private, intimate pain through images?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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It\u2019s been said that physical pain resists language, even destroys it, shattering words and reducing them to cries and groans.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Thus, in some ways pain cannot be translated or shared: \u201cTo have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 7.<\/span> If this is true for language, what about the image? Is art able to represent pain? Do artists suffer in silence? What can the field of art do against pain?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\"P.A.I.N.\"
P.A.I.N.<\/strong>
Protest in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s lobby, 
New York, 2019. 
Photo : Yana Paskova\/The Guardian\/
eyevine\/Redux<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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In 2017, American photographer Nan Goldin, known for how she documents her life and the lives of her friends and community, created the P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) collective with the aim of denouncing the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma for the production and deceptive commercialization of the opioid OxyContin\u200a\u2014\u200aa marketing strategy responsible for a million deaths due to accidental overdoses. The drug was made available to the public in increasingly higher doses at the same time as Purdue Pharma kept affirming that it was not addictive (which is not true). Purdue Pharma was dissolved after it lost a lawsuit in August 2021, and the Sackler family is required to pay a settlement of $6 billion over the next decade. Nevertheless, the Sacklers get to keep their fortune\u200a\u2014\u200ain fact, the settlement amount corresponds to the interest that will accumulate over this period. The victims\u2019 families will receive a maximum of $40,000 each, and their stories will never truly be heard. As the civil suit protects the Sacklers against any future litigation, the P.A.I.N. collective insists that they should have been criminally charged. Hence the importance, for Goldin, of protesting to museums, which, over time, have accepted donations made by the Sackler family, affixed their name to certain galleries, and thus participated in exonerating this particularly hidden form of criminality. The demonstrations organized by Goldin, inspired by the activism of ACT-UP in the 1980s and 1990s, aim to smear and literally bring down the Sackler name, to shame the Sacklers and stop them from getting away with impunity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
But what about people living with chronic pain? What might ease their suffering? The Sackler family was able to amass gargantuan sums of money precisely because opioids have the power to make pain disappear and remind the sufferers of what living without pain means\u200a\u2014\u200aeven though these drugs cause people to increase the dose as soon as the pain starts to creep back in so as to send it back to the darkness at all costs. Goldin experienced this herself and paid a high price for her dependency following a serious fall that left her with a broken wrist, a pinched nerve, and terrible pain. From OxyContin to heroin and Fentanyl, from the pharmacy to the street: Goldin\u2019s experience has led her to fight against those who make their fortunes on the back of human pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kahlo is undoubtedly the best known, the most loved, and the highest seller of all artists who have represented their chronic pain. An iconic artist, she shows her physical suffering in her self-portraits and fully participates in the image she gives us and that we have of her, even in the love we bear for her. We love her works and the resilience that they demonstrate. We love her rebellion and intractability, reflected in her pain: lover, woman, artist, sick person, beautiful rebel. But how many artists have found themselves in the shadow of the huge figure that Kahlo has become in the contemporary imagination? How many suffering faces are made invisible, and, among them, how many are those of women and non-binary people\u200a\u2014\u200awhen we know that this is the segment of humanity most likely to suffer from chronic pain and to receive inadequate treatment for such pain?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\"Chantal_duPont_Du
Chantal duPont<\/strong>
Du front tout le tour de la t\u00eate<\/em>, 2002, installation view, Galerie de l\u2019UQAM, Montr\u00e9al, 2007. 
Photo : courtesy of Collection d\u2019\u0153uvres d\u2019art de l\u2019UQAM, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Pain continues to be idealized today, particularly female pain. The mythification of the sick (young) woman, as Leslie Jamison points out in relation to literature, aestheticizes and sentimentalizes suffering, whether physical or mental, to the detriment of what this suffering actually causes<\/em>: harm. Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Marguerite Duras, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and, more recently, other women
writers from Qu\u00e9bec and elsewhere (I\u2019m thinking of Anne Boyer, Claire Marin, Terese Marie Mailhot, Jennifer B\u00e9langer, and Charlotte Biron, among others) explore their experience of illness and pain in order to reveal the suffering body and give it its due recognition. Through intimate literature, fragmented writing, demonstration, and a sense of shamelessness, these narratives of illness and pain represent a political gesture: to remove the veil of invisibility from the suffering of those who need treatment most (in the current state of society); to fight against the deafness of the medical community when it comes to suffering bodies that are not male, white, or heterosexual\u200a\u2014\u200ain other words, bodies that are not in positions of privilege or power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is also important, however, to question what we make of these texts on pain. We need to examine how we receive this type of writing. All too often, such texts are reduced to what they narrate, to the \u201ccourage\u201d of the women who wrote them, to the detriment of their form\u200a\u2014\u200atheir specific literary dimension as texts. All too often, the interpretation is limited to an essentially biographical approach. The same questions arise, it seems to me, in relation to visual representations of physical or mental pain, particularly by women artists. What do we do when we look at the paintings, photographs, or sculptures of Tracey Emin, working with her cancer and life after her bladder was removed and while mourning her mother\u2019s death? Where do we stand: across from, beside, in front of, or behind her? What about when we look at Chantal duPont\u2019s self-representation documenting the effects of chemotherapy in Du front tout le tour de la t\u00eate<\/em> (2000)? We should be able to receive, feel, share the pain revealed in the images that these artists place before us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Chantal duPont<\/strong>
Toujours plus haut<\/em>, 2002. 
Photos :  courtesy of Collection d\u2019\u0153uvres d\u2019art de l\u2019UQAM, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
As Sontag writes in relation to war, horrible, gruesome, terrible images ask us to be either spectators or cowards. She emphasizes that the question arises of what we\u2019re able to do when faced with these images, since the images shock us but also make us feel ashamed precisely because we\u2019re in the process of looking at them: perhaps only people likely to take action to calm the pain or learn something about it should have the right to look at these images? In constant pain, I see myself in artistic representations of pain. They resonate in me; I espouse them in my thoughts. But there is more to it than that: the encounter between art and pain gives my<\/em> pain permission to express itself in life, which is to say that in these images I find the right to exist. Not to be ashamed of my pain, not to seek to hide it, but to find in the source of the pain an invitation to make art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are many examples of artists who work with representations of physical or mental pain and illness. There are many examples of artists who are in pain because of their art practices, bent or leaning over the canvas, contorted before some assemblage or sculptural material, suffering from tendonitis, frozen shoulder, back pain, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, lupus, not to mention anxiety and depression, the mental illnesses of the end of our world. This suffering, a commonplace and constant companion of the artist\u2019s actions, is less represented; we might even say that it gets overwhelmed by the work produced, although in reality it can rarely be forgotten. What Kahlo\u2019s work\u200a\u2014\u200aher paintings as well as the many products derived from them\u200a\u2014\u200acontinues to remind us is that the artist\u2019s body (sick, injured, disabled, in pain) doesn\u2019t need to remain hidden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
* * *<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Some artists fight against the invisibilization of pain, the non-representation of bodies that are altered, transformed, or othered by the experience of illness and pain. Bodies that are considered less \u201cbeautiful,\u201d less \u201cpresentable\u201d because of this experience. Bodies that are perceived as \u201cabnormal\u201d and henceforth marginalized, bodies that many would prefer to disappear out of fear that such bodies might contaminate them, as though they were signs of bad luck or birds of ill omen. Or simply because these bodies remind us that we are not exempt from anything, that there is nothing normal about our \u201cnormal\u201d bodies, and that they serve only to (awkwardly, or even violently) calm an anxiety: the fear caused by anything that reminds us of our fragility, of how fleeting and small we are, of how little we matter to the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Pain, disability, death remain taboo in our production-driven societies. Capitalism and neoliberalism prohibit any lateness, any passivity, any slowness, any paralysis, any moments when the body stops, stands still, goes on strike from work, goes on strike even from ordinary life.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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In the view of societies in which the norm consists of always doing more, the body that resists, that is not a state of production, is something already dead, like the dying man that Michel de Certeau describes as \u201cfall[ing] outside the thinkable\u201d because \u201cnothing can be said in a place where nothing more can be done.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life<\/em>, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), 190.<\/span> He writes that the dying man is \u201cimmoral\u201d and \u201cob-scene\u201d (on the sidelines of the main stage of life) because he is \u201can object that no longer even makes itself available to be worked on by others\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Ibid, 190\u200a\u2014\u200a91.<\/span> in a place where the goal of the work is precisely to hide death at all costs. Yet \u201cdeath is the problem of the subject\u201d and between \u201cthe machine that stops or kicks off, and the act of dying, there is the possibility of saying.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Ibid, 192\u200a\u2014\u200a93.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
This means that there is also the possibility of writing, painting, sculpting, constructing, and making a work of art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Translated from the French by Oana Avasilichioaei<\/strong><\/p>\n
Chantal duPont, Frida Kahlo, P.A.I.N.<\/div>
Chantal duPont, Frida Kahlo, Martine Delvaux, P.A.I.N.<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first image that came to mind, an image that had haunted me already because it was the most powerful one I knew and\u00a0reminded me of my own state, was of Frida Kahlo lying on\u00a0her bed with a tilted easel before her, paint palette on her\u00a0chest, brush pointed at the canvas. Sometimes, the corset enveloping her torso is hidden under a dress. Other times, we see\u00a0it: a plaster corset that has become a canvas for painted figures. A\u00a0corset-dress. A dress-canvas. A painter-body.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":172573,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882,221],"tags":[],"numeros":[3686],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[6569],"artistes":[2913,3689,3688],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-172605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","category-uncategorized","numeros-106-pain","auteurs-martine-delvaux-en","artistes-chantal-dupont-en","artistes-frida-kahlo-en","artistes-p-a-i-n-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172605"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":271271,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172605\/revisions\/271271"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172605"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=172605"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=172605"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=172605"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=172605"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=172605"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=172605"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=172605"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=172605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}