CFP: The Productivity of Pain (6/4/03; collection)
Original essays are invited for a collection of essays tentatively
entitled The Productivity of Pain. For long, pain has been coded as a
means to salvation and knowledge, and as a stimulus to writing. Or else
it has been objectified as the truth´s negative, something that far from
ennobling human beings distances them from their affects. The logic is
not hard to stomach. Pain poses a threat to identity by making the body
alien. Sartre, in fact, confessed that illness deprived him of himself.
But, within the same movement, pain confers identity to the individual
because nobody can suffer for you, instead of you, just as nobody can
die for you. Physical suffering is thus one of the most private of