Keith Wailoo, Pain

From the second half of the twentieth century, scholars and scientists alike sought to capture the reality of pain as more than a matter of sensory physiology. Often citing each other, anthropologists and anesthesiologists, psychologists and historians have written about how social relations and norms modulate experiences and expressions of pain. The politics of pain have attracted less attention. Of course, there are astute analyses of the representational politics of differential sensitivity to pain, as well as classic accounts of inflicted pain as a political instrument. Notable among these are Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, which describes how modern power dispenses with public spectacles of pain, and Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, which explains torture as world-destroying because it dissolves common bonds of expressibility.1 By taking pain out of the public eye and accounts of sociability, these texts have perhaps posed an obstacle to the apprehension of the contemporary political stakes of pain. Keith Wailoo's Pain: A Political History, places suffering and relief at the heart of debates about the nature of the state, power and citizenship

Aesthetics · Apprehension · Citizenship · Cognitive psychology · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · State (computer science · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Medicine · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Law · Philosophy