The Contingency of Pain

Landmines. What does this word mean to you? Darkened by the horrific injuries and countless fatalities associated with it, it probably makes you feel angry or saddened. I’m sure you will be interested in the success stories that your regular support has helped to bring about . . . Landmines. Landmines are causing pain and suffering all around the world, and that is why Christian Aid is working with partners across the globe to remove them . . . Landmines. What does this word mean to you now? I hope you feel a sense of empowerment. (Christian Aid Letter 9 June 2003)¹

How does pain enter politics? How are lived experiences of pain shaped by contact with others? Pain has often been described as a private, even lonely experience, as a feeling that I have that others cannot have, or as a feeling that others have that I myself cannot feel (Kotarba 1983: 15). And yet the pain of others is continually evoked in public discourse, as that which demands a collective as well as individual response. In the quote above from a Christian Aid letter, the pain of others is first presented through the use of the word ‘landmines’. The word is not accompanied by a description or history; it is assumed that the word itself is enough to evoke images of pain and suffering for the reader.² Indeed, the word is repeated in the letter, and is transformed from ‘sign’ to the ‘agent’ behind the injuries: ‘Landmines are causing pain and suffering all around the world.’ Of course, this utterance speaks a certain truth. And yet, to make landmines the ‘cause’ of pain and suffering is to stop too soon in a chain of events: landmines are themselves effects of histories of war; they were placed by humans to injure and maim other humans. The word evokes that history, but it also stands for it, as a history of war, suffering and injustice. Such a letter shows us how the language of pain operates through signs, which convey histories that involve injuries to bodies, at the same time as they conceal the presence or ‘work’ of other bodies.

The letter is addressed to ‘friends’ of Christian Aid, those who have already made donations to the charity. It focuses on the emotions of the reader who is interpellated as ‘you’, as the one who ‘probably’ has certain feelings about the suffering and pain of others. So ‘you’ probably feel ‘angry’ or ‘saddened’. The reader is presumed to be moved by the injuries of others, and it is this movement that enables them to give. To this extent, the letter is not about the other, but about the reader: the reader’s feelings are the ones that are addressed, which are the ‘subject’ of the letter. The ‘anger’ and ‘sadness’ the reader should feel when faced with the other’s pain is what allows the reader to enter into a relationship with the other, premised on generosity rather than indifference. The negative emotions of anger and sadness are evoked as the reader’s: the pain of others becomes ‘ours’, an appropriation that transforms and perhaps even neutralises their pain into our sadness. It is not so much that we are ‘with them’ by feeling sad; the apparently shared negative feelings do not position the reader and victim in a relation of equivalence, or what Elizabeth V. Spelman calls co-suffering (Spelman 1997: 65). Rather, we feel sad about their suffering, an ‘aboutness’ that ensures that they remain the object of ‘our feeling’. So, at one level, the reader in accepting the imperative to feel sad about the other’s pain is aligned with the other. But the alignment works by differentiating between the reader and the others: their feelings remain the object of ‘my feelings’, while my feelings only ever approximate the form of theirs.

It is instructive that the narrative of the letter is hopeful. The letter certainly promises a lot. What is promised is not so much the overcoming of the pain of others, but the empowerment of the reader: ‘I hope you feel a sense of empowerment.’ The pain of the other is overcome, but it is not the object of hope in the narrative; rather, the overcoming of the pain is instead a means by which the reader is empowered. So the reader, whom we can name inadequately as the ‘Western subject’, feels better after hearing about individual stories of success, narrated as the overcoming of pain as well as the healing of community. These stories are about the lives of individuals that have been saved: ‘Chamreun is a survivor of a landmine explosion and, having lost his leg, is all the more determined to make his community a safer place in which to live.’ These stories of bravery, of the overcoming of pain, are indeed moving. But interestingly the agent in the stories is not the other, but the charity, aligned here with the reader: through ‘your regular support’, you have ‘helped to bring about’ these success stories. Hence the narrative of the letter ends with the reader’s ‘empowerment’. The word ‘landmines’, it is suggested, now makes ‘you’ feel a sense of empowerment, rather than anger or sadness. 

This letter and the charitable discourses of compassion more broadly show us that stories of pain involve complex relations of power. As Elizabeth V. Spelman notes in Fruits of Sorrow, ‘Compassion, like other forms of caring, may also reinforce the very patterns of economic and political subordination responsible for such suffering’ (Spelman 1997: 7). In the letter, the reader is empowered through a detour into anger and sadness about the pain of others. The reader is also elevated into a position of power over others: the subject who gives to the other is the one who is ‘behind’ the possibility of overcoming pain. The over-representation of the pain of others is significant in that it fixes the other as the one who ‘has’ pain, and who can overcome that pain only when the Western subject feels moved enough to give. In this letter, generosity becomes a form of individual and possibly even national character; something ‘I’ or ‘we’ have, which is shown in how we are moved by others. The transformation of generosity into a character trait involves fetishism: it forgets the gifts made by others (see Diprose 2002), as well as prior relations of debt accrued over time. In this case, the West gives to others only insofar as it is forgotten what the West has already taken in its very capacity to give in the first place. In the Christian Aid letter, feelings of pain and suffering, which are in part effects of socio-economic relations of violence and poverty, are assumed to be alleviated by the very generosity that is enabled by such socio-economic relations. So the West takes, then gives, and in the moment of giving repeats as well as conceals the taking.

But is the story ‘about’ pain, whether in the form of ‘our sadness’ or the other’s suffering? My reading of this letter has involved reading claims to pain as well as sadness and suffering. But what does it mean to be in pain or indeed to have it? It is difficult to talk about the experience of pain. As Elaine Scarry suggests in her powerful book, The Body in Pain, pain is not only a bodily trauma, it also resists or even ‘shatters’ language and communication (Scarry 1985: 5). So that which seems most self-evident – most there, throbbing in its thereness – also slips away, refuses to be simply present in speech, or forms of testimonial address. And yet, as we have seen, claims to pain and suffering on behalf of myself or others are repeated in forms of speech and writing. There is a connection between the over-representation of pain and its unrepresentability. So, for example, I may not be able to describe ‘adequately’ the feelings of pain, and yet I may evoke my pain, again and again, as something that I have. Indeed, I may repeat the words ‘pain’ or ‘hurts’ precisely given the difficulty of translating the feeling into descriptive language. The vocabularies that are available for describing pain, either through medical language that codifies pain (see Burns, Busby and Sawchuk 1999: xii) or through metaphor that creates relations of likeness (see Scarry 1985), seem inadequate in the face of the feeling.
What claims of pain are doing must be linked in some way to what pain does to bodies how the labour of pain and the language of pain work in specific and determined ways to affect differences between bodies. I will return to the question of how pain enters politics after reflecting on the lived experiences of pain.

Pain surfaces

We could begin by asking: What is pain? What does it mean to be in pain? Pain is usually described as a sensation or feeling (Cowan 1968: 15). But it is of course a particular kind of sensation. The International Association for the Study of Pain has adopted the following definition:

(a) pain is subjective; (b) pain is more complex than an elementary sensory event; (c) the experience of pain involves associations between elements of sensory experience and an aversive feeling state; and (d) the attribution of meaning to the unpleasant sensory events is an intrinsic part of the experience of pain. (Chapman 1986: 153)

This definition stresses how pain, as an unpleasant or negative sensation, is not simply reducible to sensation: how we experience pain involves the attribution of meaning through experience, as well as associations between different kinds of negative or aversive feelings. So pain is not simply the feeling that corresponds to bodily damage. Whilst pain might seem selfevident – we all know our own pain, it burns through us – the experience and indeed recognition of pain as pain involves complex forms of association between sensations and other kinds of ‘feeling states’.

In medical discourse, it is taken for granted that there is not a simple relationship or correspondence between an external stimulus and the sensation of pain (leading to the development, for example, of the gateway theory of pain) (see Melzack and Wall 1996). Pain is not only treated as symptomatic of disease or injury: for instance, chronic pain is treated as a medical condition with its own history (Kotarba 1983). There are many instances when the relationship between the intensity of pain and the severity of injury is not proportional (Melzack and Wall 1996: 1). In the classic medical textbook on pain, The Challenge of Pain, Melzack and Wall suggest that pain:

is not simply a function of the amount of bodily damage alone. Rather, the amount and quality of pain we feel are also determined by our previous experiences and how well we remember them, by our ability to understand the cause of the pain and to grasp its consequences. (Melzack and Wall 1996: 15)

If pain is not simply an effect of damage to the body, then how can we understand pain?

Rather than considering how the feeling of pain is determined (by, for example, previous experiences), we can consider instead what the feeling of pain does. The affectivity of pain is crucial to the forming of the body as both a material and lived entity. In The Ego and the Id, Freud suggests that the ego is ‘first and foremost a bodily ego’ (Freud 1964b: 26). Crucially, the formation of the bodily ego is bound up with the surface: ‘It is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface’ (Freud 1964b: 26). Freud suggests that the process of establishing the surface depends on the experience of bodily sensations such as pain. Pain is described as an ‘external and internal perception, which behaves like an internal perception even when its source is in the external world’ (Freud 1964b: 22, emphasis added). It is through sensual experiences such as pain that we come to have a sense of our skin as bodily surface (see Prosser 1998: 43), as something that keeps us apart from others, and as something that ‘mediates’ the relationship between internal or external, or inside and outside.

However, it is not that pain causes the forming of the surface. Such a reading would ontologise pain (and indeed sensation more broadly) as that which ‘drives’ being itself.³er, it is through the flow of sensations and feelings that become conscious as pain and pleasure that different surfaces are established. For example, say I stub my toe on the table. The impression of the table is one of negation; it leaves its trace on the surface of my skin and I respond with the appropriate ‘ouch’ and move away, swearing. It is through such painful encounters between this body and other objects, including other bodies, that ‘surfaces’ are felt as ‘being there’ in the first place. To be more precise the impression of a surface is an effect of such intensifications of feeling. I become aware of my body as having a surface only in the event of feeling discomfort (prickly sensations, cramps) that become transformed into pain through an act of reading and recognition (‘it hurts!’), which is also a judgement (‘it is bad!’). The recognition of a sensation as being painful (from ‘it hurts’ to ‘it is bad’ to ‘move away’) also involves the reconstitution of bodily space, as the reorientation of the bodily relation to that which gets attributed as the cause of the pain. In this instance, having ‘felt’ the surface as hurtful, I move my toe away from its proximity to the surface of the table. I move away from what I feel is the cause of the pain, and it feels like I am moving away from the pain.

Such an argument suggests an intimate relationship between what Judith Butler has called ‘materialisation’ – ‘the effect of boundary, fixity and surface’ (Butler 1993: 9) – and what I would call intensification. It is through the intensification of pain sensations that bodies and worlds materialise and take shape, or that the effect of boundary, surface and fixity is produced. To say that feelings are crucial to the forming of surfaces and borders is to suggest that what ‘makes’ those borders also unmakes them. In other words, what separates us from others also connects us to others. This paradox is clear if we think of the skin surface itself, as that which appears to contain us, but as where others impress upon us. This contradictory function of skin begins to make sense if we unlearn the assumption that the skin is simply already there, and begin to think of the skin as a surface that is felt only in the event of being ‘impressed upon’ in the encounters we have with others. As Roselyne Rey puts it: ‘Through his [sic] skin – the boundary between the self and the world . . . every human being is subject to a multitude of impressions’ (Rey 1995: 5).

This surfacing of bodies involves the over-determination of sense perception, emotion and judgement. It is through the recognition or interpretation of sensations, which are responses to the impressions of objects and others, that bodily surfaces take shape. I am not saying here that emotions are the same thing as sensations, but that the very intensity of perception often means a slide from one to another, as a slide that does follow as a sequence in time. Hence whilst sensation and emotion are irreducible, they cannot simply be separated at the level of lived experience.⁴sations are mediated, however immediately they seem to impress upon us. Not only do we read such feelings, but how the feelings feel in the first place may be tied to a past history of readings, in the sense that the process of recognition (of this feeling, or that feeling) is bound up with what we already know. For example, the sensation of pain is deeply affected by memories: one can feel pain when reminded of past trauma by an encounter with another. Or if one has a pain one might search one’s memories for whether one has had it before, differentiating the strange from the familiar. Indeed, even before I begin my search, the sensation may impress upon me in a certain way, bypassing my consciousness. Only later will I realise that the hurt ‘hurts’ because of this or that. Even though pain is described by many as non-intentional, as not ‘about’ something, it is affected by objects of perception that gather as one’s past bodily experience. Indeed, Lucy Bending suggests that although pain may not be about something, it is still ‘because something’, and this ‘because’ involves acts of attribution, explanation and narration, which function as the object of pain (Bending 2000: 86). It is not just that we interpret our pain as a sign of something, but that how pain feels in the first place is an effect of past impressions, which are often hidden from view. The very words we then use to tell the story of our pain also work to reshape our bodies, creating new impressions. The slide between sensations of pain and other kinds of ‘negative feeling states’ is bound up with the work that pain is doing in creating the very surfaces of bodies.

It may seem counter-intuitive to say that pain is crucial to the formation of the body as a perceiving surface. For example, don’t I already have a sense of where my body is before I feel it as ‘being hurt’? Isn’t that knowledge necessary to the very ability to feel that pain as a pain in different parts of the body? How else would it be possible for me to say, ‘I have pain in my toe’? Of course, in some ways I do already have a sense of my body surface. After all, life experience involves multiple collisions with objects and others. It is through such collisions that I form a sense of myself as (more or less) apart from others, as well as a sense of the surfaces of my body. Such a sense of apartness may be crucial for bodily survival (for those who lack the ability to feel pain-like sensations, the world is very dangerous),⁵ though it may be felt differently by different bodies. So I do have a sense of myself as body, before I encounter an object. But what is crucial is that although I have a sense of my body before each new encounter, my body seems to disappear from view; it is often forgotten as I concentrate on this or on that.

This process is described beautifully by Drew Leder in The Absent Body. He suggests that ‘the body is “absent” only because it is perpetually outside itself, caught up in a multitude of involvements with other people’ (Leder 1990: 4). And so, experiences of dysfunction (such as pain) become lived as a return to the body, or a rendering present to consciousness of what has become absent: ‘Insofar as the body tends to disappear when functioning unproblematically, it often seizes our attention most strongly at times of dysfunction’ (Leder 1990: 4). The intensity of feelings like pain recalls us to our body surfaces: pain seizes me back to my body. Leder also suggests that pain can often lead to a body that turns in on itself, while pleasure tends to open up bodies to other bodies (Leder 1990: 74–5; see also Chapter 7). Indeed, bodies in pain might come to our attention in this very process of turning in; their ‘forming’ is a ‘reforming’. Bodily surfaces become reformed not only in instances when we might move away from objects that cause injury, but also in the process of moving towards the body and seeking to move away from the pain. In my experiences of period pain,⁶ for example, I feel a dull throbbing that makes me curl up. I try and become as small as possible. I hug myself. I turn this way and that. The pain presses against me. My body takes a different shape as it tries to move away from the pain, even though what is being moved away from is felt within my body.

However, I would not use the terms ‘absent’ and ‘present’ to describe embodiment as Leder does, as it implies the possibility that bodies can simply appear or disappear. Rather, I would point to the economic nature of intensification, and suggest that one is more or less aware of bodily surfaces depending on the range and intensities of bodily experiences. The intensity of pain sensations makes us aware of our bodily surfaces, and points to the dynamic nature of surfacing itself (turning in, turning away, moving towards, moving away). Such intensity may impress upon the surfaces of bodies through negation: the surface is felt when something is felt ‘against’ it. As Elaine Scarry suggests, the experience of pain is often felt as negation: something from outside presses upon me, even gets inside me (Scarry 1985: 15). When there is no external object, we construct imaginary objects or weapons to take up their empty place: we might use expressions like ‘I feel like I have been stabbed by a knife’ (Scarry 1985: 55). It is this perceived intrusion of something other within the body that creates the desire to re-establish the border, to push out the pain, or the (imagined, material) object we feel is the ‘cause’ of the pain. Pain involves the violation or transgression of the border between inside and outside, and it is through this transgression that I feel the border in the first place.

In the example of period pain discussed above, I also create an imagined object. The pain is too familiar – I have felt it so many times before. I remember each time, anew. So I know it is my period, and the knowledge affects how it feels: it affects the pain. In this instance, the blood becomes the ‘object’ that pushes against me, which presses against me, and that I imagine myself to be pushing out, as if it were an alien within. I want the pain to leave me; it is not a part of me, even though it is in my body that I feel it. So pain can be felt as something ‘not me’ within ‘me’: it is the impression of the ‘not’ that is at stake. It is hence not incidental that the sensation of pain is often represented – both visually and in narrative – through ‘the wound’ (a bruised or cut skin surface). The wound functions as a trace of where the surface of another entity (however imaginary) has impressed upon the body, an impression that is felt and seen as the violence of negation.

It is these moments of intensification that define the contours of the ordinary surfaces of bodily dwelling, surfaces that are marked by differences in the very experience of intensities.⁷ As pain sensations demand that I attend to my embodied existence, then I come to inhabit the surfaces of the world in a particular way. The tingles, pricks and then cramps return me to my body by giving me a sense of the edge or border, a ‘sense’ that is an experience of intensification and a departure from what is lived as ordinary. The ordinary is linked in this way to the absence of perception, rather than the absence of the body (see Chapter 8). As Elizabeth Grosz puts it, in the case of pain: ‘The effected zones of the body become enlarged and magnified in the body image’ (Grosz 1994: 76). Such enlarged sensations of the limits of our bodies may also involve an impression of the particularity of how they occupy time and space. In other words, I become aware of bodily limits as my bodily dwelling or dwelling place when I am in pain. Pain is hence bound up with how we inhabit the world, how we live in relationship to the surfaces, bodies and objects that make up our dwelling places. Our question becomes not so much what is pain, but what does pain do.

Notably, Jean-Paul Sartre describes pain as ‘a contingent attachment to the world’ (Sartre 1996: 333). For Sartre, the lived experience of pain as ‘being there’ is dependent on what bodies are doing (reading, writing, sleeping, walking) on how they might be arranged. Or, in my terms, pain sensations might rearrange bodies, which huddle or shudder into different shapes, shapes that take shape here or there, in this place or that. So the experience of pain does not cut off the body in the present, but attaches this body to the world of other bodies, an attachment that is contingent on elements that are absent in the lived experience of pain.

The contingency of pain is linked both to its dependence on other elements, and also to touch. The word ‘contingency’ has the same root in Latin as the word ‘contact’ (Latin: contingere: com, with; tangere, to touch). Contingency is linked in this way to the sociality of being ‘with’ others, of getting close enough to touch. But we must remember that not all attachments are loving. We are touched differently by different others (see Ahmed 2000: 44–50) and these differences involve not just marks on the body, but different intensities of pleasure and pain. So what attaches us, what connects us to this place or that place, to this other or that other is also what we find most touching; it is that which makes us feel. The differentiation between attachments allows us to align ourselves with some others and against other others in the very processes of turning and being turned, or moving towards and away from those we feel have caused our pleasure and pain.

For example, to be touched in a certain way, or to be moved in a certain way by an encounter with another, may involve a reading not only of the encounter, but of the other that is encountered as having certain characteristics. If we feel another hurts us, then that feeling may convert quickly into a reading of the other, such that it becomes hurtful, or is read as the impression of the negative. In other words, the ‘it hurts’ becomes, ‘you hurt me’, which might become, ‘you are hurtful’, or even ‘you are bad’. These affective responses are readings that not only create the borders between selves and others, but also ‘give’ others meaning and value in the very act of apparent separation, a giving that temporarily fixes an other, through the movement engendered by the affective response itself. Such responses are clearly mediated: materialisation takes place through the ‘mediation’ of affect, which may function in this way as readings of the bodies of others.⁸

The sociality of pain

Such a model of pain as contingent, as that which attaches us to others through the very process of intensification, might seem counter-intuitive. As I pointed out in the opening of this chapter, pain is often represented within Western culture as a lonely thing (Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997: xiii). For example, Kotarba describes how pain experience is ‘inherently private and remains unnoticed by others unless actively disclosed by the sufferer’ (Kotarba 1983: 15). But even when the experience of pain is described as private, that privacy is linked to the experience of being with others. In other words, it is the apparent loneliness of pain that requires it to be disclosed to a witness. Melzack and Wall suggest that: ‘Because pain is a private, personal experience, it is impossible for us to know precisely what someone else’s pain feels like’ (Melzack and Wall 1996: 41). We can see that the impossibility of inhabiting the other’s body creates a desire to know ‘what it feels like’. To turn this around, it is because no one can know what it feels like to have my pain that I want loved others to acknowledge how I feel. The solitariness of pain is intimately tied up with its implication in relationship to others.

So while the experience of pain may be solitary, it is never private. A truly private pain would be one ended by a suicide without a note. But even then one seeks a witness, though a witness who arrives after the anticipated event of one’s own death. Perhaps the over-investment in the loneliness of pain comes from the presumption that it is always ‘my’ pain that we are talking about – a presumption that is clear, for example, in the phenomenological and existential writings on pain (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Sartre 1996). But we can ask Wittgenstein’s (1964) question: What about the pain of others? Or, how am I affected by pain when I am faced by another’s pain? Because we don’t inhabit her body, does that mean that her pain has nothing to do with us? For me, these are personal questions. I would say that my main experiences of living with pain relate to living with my mother’s pain. My mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis just after I was born. I was sent away to Pakistan and they thought she was dying. I lived in Pakistan for over a year (there are pictures of me with grandparents I now struggle to recall), while my mother pulled through. She lived, she lives on. In fact, decades later they realised they had got it wrong and they changed her diagnosis to transverse myelitis. It meant that her illness isn’t degenerative. But it doesn’t mean an end to her pain. And the change in diagnosis gave her a different kind of pain.
You might note that I said ‘living with’ my mother’s pain. You might question this. It is my mother who has pain. She has to live with it. Yet, the experience of living with my mother was an experiencing of living with her pain, as pain was such a significant part of her life. I would look at her and see her pain. I was the witness towards whom her pleas would be addressed, although her pleas would not simply be a call for action (sometimes there would be nothing for me to do). Her pleas would sometimes just be for me to bear witness, to recognise her pain. Through such witnessing, I would grant her pain the status of an event, a happening in the world, rather than just the ‘something’ she felt, the ‘something’ that would come and go with her coming and going. Through witnessing, I would give her pain a life outside the fragile borders of her vulnerable and much loved body. But her pain, despite being the event that drew us together (the quiet nights in watching classical movies; it was a life together that hummed with sentimentality), was still shrouded in mystery. I lived with what was, for me, the unliveable.

Pain, which is often experienced as ‘already there’, is difficult to grasp and to speak about, whether in the event of talking about pain in the past or pain in the present. When we talk of the experience of pain we assume it is ‘my pain’ because I cannot feel the other’s pain. I may experience my pain as too present and the other’s as too absent. And yet, others are in pain; I read her body as a sign of pain. I see you grimace, or your face, white and drawn. I watch sadly as your body curls up, curls away. I want to reach you, to touch you. Love is often conveyed by wanting to feel the loved one’s pain, to feel the pain on her behalf (see Chapter 6 for an analysis of love). I want to have her pain so she can be released from it, so she doesn’t have to feel it. This is love as empathy: I love you, and imagine not only that I can feel how you feel, but that I could feel your pain for you. But I want that feeling only insofar as I don’t already have it; the desire maintains the difference between the one who would ‘become’ in pain, and another who already ‘is’ in pain or ‘has’ it. In this way empathy sustains the very difference that it may seek to overcome: empathy remains a ‘wish feeling’, in which subjects ‘feel’ something other than what another feels in the very moment of imagining they could feel what another feels.⁹

The impossibility of feeling the pain of others does not mean that the pain is simply theirs, or that their pain has nothing to do with me. I want to suggest here, cautiously, and tentatively, that an ethics of responding to pain involves being open to being affected by that which one cannot know or feel. Such an ethics is, in this sense, bound up with the sociality or the ‘contingent attachment’ of pain itself. Much of the thinking on pain, however, contrasts the ungraspability of the other’s pain with the graspability of my own pain. Elaine Scarry makes this contrast in her analysis of pain and torture (1985: 4). Certainly, there is something ungraspable about the other’s pain, and this is not just because I do not feel it. But my pain, even when I feel it, is not always so graspable. So in some sense, as I respond to this other’s pain, as I touch her cheek, I come to feel that which I cannot know. It is the ungraspability of her pain, in the face of the thereness of my own, that throws me into disbelief. But it is not her pain that I disbelieve. I believe in it, more and more. I am captured by the intensity of this belief. Rather it is my pain that becomes uncertain. I realise that my pain – it seems so there – is unliveable to others, thrown as they are into a different bodily world. The ungraspability of her pain calls me back to my body, even when it is not in pain, to feel it, to explore its surfaces, to inhabit it. In other words, the ungraspability of my own pain is brought to the surface by the ungraspability of the pain of others. Such a response to her pain is not simply a return to the self (how do I feel given that I don’t know how she feels?): this is not a radical egoism. Rather, in the face of the otherness of my own pain, I am undone, before her, and for her.

The sociality of pain – the ‘contingent attachment’ of being with others – requires an ethics, an ethics that begins with your pain, and moves towards you, getting close enough to touch you, perhaps even close enough to feel the sweat that may be the trace of your pain on the surface of your body. Insofar as an ethics of pain begins here, with how you come to surface, then the ethical demand is that I must act about that which I cannot know, rather than act insofar as I know. I am moved by what does not belong to me. If I acted on her behalf only insofar as I knew how she felt, then I would act only insofar as I would appropriate her pain as my pain, that is, appropriate that which I cannot feel. To return to my introduction to this chapter, it is the very assumption that we know how the other feels, which would allow us to transform their pain into our sadness.

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Sara Ahmed (2004), The cultural politics of emotion, Edinburgh University Press