We talked about the essay. One word we came a lot back to is pain. This is of course a very broad term, but there seems to be a strong relation with your work. You told me you don’t want to shock with your work. Rather you want to use estrangement to make something that is not strange approachable again or experienceable again.  For instance, pain related to the body, flesh, and blood, or certain emotions related to pain, like love. You also talked about a poet who could make the Balkan wars experienceable for you, using in his poems the words blood, speaking blood. You experienced something via the poem that you could not find in stories. You felt in the poem the bloodiness and pain of war. You also talked about the paradox of pain nowadays. On the one hand, we have found ways to talk about pain (it was terrible during the First World War how the pain of soldiers was denied) but on the other hand, we seem to have become desensitized from pain, it has become a form of entertainment (you also related this aspect to the movie Fight Club, see post 1). In media, we can see a lot of blood and violence which seems to make us numb to it. We also talked about Herman Nitzsch (see post 2), the way he also wants to react to desensitization from pain, and how he tries with rituals and flesh to reconnect again to something deeply human, something raw we can’t deny. At the same time, he reacts also to a (capitalistic) society driven by entertainment and individualism, and the loss of rituals. You also related pain to the word self-realization. Did you mean that we learn from pain? We also talked about how we can lose connection with our mortal body, losing the feeling of being alive, which maybe is related to the media world of representations we are living in, detaching us from our body. Zizek is writing about this (post 3), and how this also can lead to self-harm. You also talked about a Slovenian artist who did a  performance in which he damaged his own body. You described how people got shocked, while at the same time, we have become desensitized from a lot of ‘torture and pain’ in movies and news bulletins. This is also what I relate to your interest in body autopsy. You told me you would like to visit once such an autopsy, at university, for instance, the RUG. You are curious how you would react to this. Would you also feel shocked? And you also would like to research the materiality of the body. This could be an essay topic. Probably your essay will revolve around pain. Why are you drawn to pain? You first can make notes, and go into different aspects, for instance, you can respond to movies, poems, your own experiences, and so on. At last, I want to point out the research Byung Chul Han called The Palliative Society: Pain Today (see post 4): This slim volume, written aphoristically, explores the philosophical complexities of pain in societies marked by an extreme aversion to pain and discomfort. For Han, pain is not simply a sensation or feeling of displeasure; rather it constitutes important ways of what it means to be human. Indeed, for Han we are so much the worse for our penchant to flee it. Pain is an opening via negation to otherness, and without it, we are lost “in the hell of the same” (p. 6, emphasis in original). What Han calls “the neoliberal dispositif of happiness” (p. 13) distorts happiness, which “is not at one’s disposal. Inherent in it is a certain negativity” (p. 13).

Also I added some other posts:

Post 5:
Philosopher Onfray about the body and hedonism 

Post 6:
About pain and boredom

Post 7:
A site of Asaf (Klaf) Weisman. His studies revolve around pain, chronic pain, and spinal health. Fascination with pain. His research interests include pain, chronic pain, spinal biomechanics and morphometry, and the philosophy of science

Post 8: 
Movie the square, tension raw energy and the closed art world

Post 9:
The Human Pincushion: The Story Of Edward H. Gibson

Post 10:
About the neuroscience of pain The Neuroscience of pain

Post 11:
Philosopher Simone Weil  on pain and violence

 

Best regards,

Hille

#Byung-Chul Han

A research of Psychologist #TimothyWilson (University of Virginia). He put test subjects in a room and administered an electric shock to them. All participants stated that they were willing to pay so as not to receive a second shock. But when the experimenter left the room and let a few minutes pass… Many candidates gave themselves another shock out of boredom. Apparently, we would rather experience something unpleasant than nothing at all.

#velvetunderground #pain #limerence