Title of the paper:
Abstract: In extending my earlier work on the limits of knowing Suffering, I would like to discuss here the limits of narrating Suffering. The paradigmatic cases of silent pain and unvoiced sufferingare distinguished precisely by our inability to translate certain sensory or emotional experiences into communicable concepts that testify to our awareness and clear representation of the situation. These cases serve as fundamental structures in the general layout of Suffering, exposing the possibility that a person in a state of unaware suffering may be engaged in a totally different mode of experiencing: a manner that does not enhance the “power of knowing” but which does offer a different outlook by explaining why the lived and felt is not always intelligible.
Yet, the problem with these prototype cases is not only that they are insufficiently recognized and thus mistakenly considered as puzzling exceptions in the area of pain research which scientific progress should ultimately be able to resolve. But even if we recognize their possibility, deciphering them remains challenging. In viewing pain as something that may be experienced beyond the level of knowledge (see Elaine Scary on the one hand and the French Post-phenomenological tradition on the other), we wonder what conveys these objectless, non-conceptualized lived moments that resist representation and often remain wordless. In order to answer this question, I will defend the idea that Suffering/Pain may fall out of words but not out of language, showing how the wounded can still speak to us in a manner that does not obey the rules of narration (whether spoken or written) but which demonstrates the impact of the pre-reflective dimension in life. A dimension that is very decisive, after all, in determining the nature and the meaning of Pain.
Biographical information: Dr. Bustan Smadar. Double PhD in philosophy (Sorbonne/University of Tel-Aviv). Co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Working Group on Suffering and Pain (Harvard. Feb. 2008). http://www.suffering-pain.net/. Now at the University of Luxembourg
She has written on German phenomenology, French contemporary philosophy and more recently, on the possible bridge between Continental and American philosophies. She has translated three books. Her project on suffering is a long-term research plan, underlying her thesis on pre-reflectivity, the conductive thread of a planned trilogy: The first book in ethics "From Intellectualism to Ethics - Emmanuel Levinas and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl" (ed. Ousia, Jan. 2011). The second book demonstrates the role of pre-reflectivity in the social and political domains. The third book, a treaty on suffering and pain, intends to show a post-phenomenological way of linking the body and the mind.
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