The Body in Pain
The Making and Unmaking of the World
The central notion on which this book dwells is the eternal transformation between making and unmaking of the world in which we live. It is the human capacity, and maybe fate, which steers human beings to make the reality, the objective reality, the sharable realm, the tangible, and then to unmake what they made, receding it to fiction, the unreal realm, the imagined, the intangible that is we cannot grasp in our sensation. And again, from the realm of fiction, we, human beings, are steered again by our capacity to embody the imagined, the fiction, so we make the “unmade,” giving it a body, turning it into a sharable world. The cycle continues infinitely (see illustrative figure. 1. If the photo is not clear, click it here).
Why does this cycle exist?
Or how does it work, how does it exist?
Its “making” wing is the real world in which we can see each other,
share common sense, touch tangible objects, and talk about things existing
there in this real world. The absolute “nature” or the absolute value of this
“real,” of the making wing, is body. My body is the closet tangible and real
thing or object that I can recognize and sense. Without my body, I cease to
exist and so does the world. The body, in turn, reaches or materializes its
infinite nature, the extreme value, though pain. Why? Every sensation,
feeling, or recognition has an object against which this sensation impinges.
You love someone, you hate a type of food, you are afraid of a thing, and so
on. You are in pain of … nothing. Pain has no object onto which it can hinge.
Pain is objectless. It is a mere, absolute sensation, it is an absolute feeling
that is generated from the body without any object. Hence, a body in pain is an
absolute sensation; it is the most real because it does not need any other
object to feel its pain.
Pain is not sharable at all. It resists “verbal objectification”
(p.12). How can you share, really share, something that is objectless? In order
to share your pain with others you have to create an imagined body: when you
have a pain, what causes the pain is your body itself; if a nail penetrates
your foot, the pain is caused by - firstly - the nail and - secondly
- (i.e., more closely to the real cause) by the body itself. Pain has always a double
agent causing it: the trigger (fever, nail, lashing, etc.) and the body
itself. So, saying that what causes a pain is a nail entering my foot is not
sharing. You have to say I feel pain because a nail entered my foot and my body
hurts my body. A listener should imagine a body, his body, experiencing a
nail entering its foot, then causing pain similar to what you say. He or she
can imagine a nail penetrating a foot, but it is impossible to interiorly
incorporate an image of a body (another body) hurting even if the listener had
a previous close experience. Pain is objectless, so it is timeless. You cannot
share it with other. But it is really here, I feel it, my body in pain, and
this cannot be more real. Pain is the most real thing that I, as a person,
experience. But I cannot share it with others. That is why pain constitutes the
extreme value of the body: It makes it the extreme real, but “unfortunately”
non-sharable. The absolute real, seemingly, is escaping the world of reality,
the tangible; it roams around the edge of this reality. It is able to flee the
realm of “making.”
This absolute reality, the absolute real, the omnipresent sensation
that does not need an object to be (because it is so much real) now escapes the
real realm, the making wing of this cycle, and enters the world of fiction, of imagination.
The world of imagination is unreal. It is a fiction. Imagination
consists of two stages: make-up and make-real. Making-up is to start coveting a
fiction, a thing that does not exist (otherwise it is not a fiction); this
thing, which is to be imagined, cannot be seen by me, a human being who is
calling it to come. Imagination in its deepest nature is an object that cannot
be seen yet. Think of it in this way: You need to create a “thing” (a
painting, poetry, a novel, a vehicle) that is absolutely fictious, then it must
have never existed before; i.e., it must
be unreal. Nevertheless, it is a “thing” to come, you know it is a thing, but
you cannot see it, you cannot touch it, you cannot yet describe it.
Hence, imagination is, contrary to pain, only an object, an absolute object
that is not seen yet (while pain is an absolute sensation that has no object).
We cannot stay in the realm of imagination, unrealness, the
unmaking wing of the cycle, so we have to give a sensation to the object we are
trying to imagine, to create. We embody it. This is the second stage of
imagination: make-real. We give the imagination a body that we can see. We
make the “unmade.” So, we again enter the wing of “making.” The cycle
continues in this manner.
This cycle is our nature as human being on this earth. Based on it,
this book explains torture and war. Why do wars happen? Why do we torture
others?
Both of torture and war are functions of fiction. Torture’s
motivation is only masqueraded by information extraction or punishing a
prisoner, but fiction is what engenders our ability to torture. War is not
national defense, nor is it nation-recreation, it is the capacity of fiction
that pushes us, as human beings, to war.
Torture
Torture means inflicting as much as possible pain to a body.
Torturer pushes the pain in the body to its extreme level; hence, he pushes it
towards the edge of unreal. Torture unmakes the made, it unmakes the body. It
transforms the body from the making wing to the unmaking wing as the motivation
of fiction nourishes a torturer to do so, or the capacity of human beings of
fiction, or unmaking the made, ignites a torturer to push his prisoner’s body to
the edge of the unreal, unmaking it. Let us explain more.
When a prisoner is tortured, pain is exacerbated. The body, as we
said, reaches its extreme value: Now it is the most real thing, only pain
exists, only pain is generated from the body, and the limits between the
existence, the universe, and the body cease to exist. Either the body becomes
the universe or the universe shrinks to be the body. I am tortured, so I am in
a huge pain, my body is really, very really, here, it tells me through pain how
much it is real, but I cannot share that with others. In the extreme pain, the
world ceases to exist, nothing but my body exists. The Self, the voice, the
objects cease to exist. Only my body in pain is here. My body is absolutely
here and is absolutely absent from others, from the sharable world. Then the
body deteriorates to be nothing, to be unreal, to enter the realm of fiction.
How?
In torture, my body is what hurts me, my body is against me. The
torturer is only the first agent of pain, but it is my body what hurts me. I
become against me. This is self-annihilation. Moreover, in torture
everything that the civilization has made is turned into a tool for torture
(e.g., electricity, even doors are used to hurt your fingers). The “made” by
civilization participates in torture, in annihilating the body; therefore,
torture is “the de-objectifying of objects, the unmaking of the made” (p.41).
Objects cease to exist as they are made (a door is no more a door, but a tool
for torture). This completes the transformation from the making wing to the
unmaking. Everything is de-objectified; everything is fictious now.
According to that, if a
prisoner confesses, that does not mean anything. In pain, the voice ceases to
exist, the world ceases to exist, so a prisoner does not really confess. He
cannot. He loses his voice, he loses the world on which he can make a
confession about. The torturer, himself, ironically does not usurp power as he
tortures the prisoner more and more because as more he inflicts pain on the
prisoner’s body, the body and its world and voice cease to exist. The
torturer usurps only absence. Pain in its extreme value unmakes the objects
of sensation. Power becomes naked with no object.
War
“[I]t is when a country has become to its population a fiction
that war begins […] ” (p.131, italic in origin).
War is not waged for national defense, at a fundamental level, and
it is not a way to recreate the national self, but war is a “fiction generating”
capacity (p.142). Similarly to torture (to some extent), war is a function of
fiction, to generate fiction, and then, as it ends, to make this fiction real.
How can we understand these blurry ideas?
Let X and Y be two nations. Each one of them has a self, an identity,
an understanding of itself and of its ideologies as real. For a nation, the
self, the ideas, etc. are real as much as a tree and a mountain are real. When nation
X and Y start to de-real each other, when they begin to uproot the self-perception
of each other from its realness, showing it as unreal, as illusions, then they
start the war. They start the war because the two “reals” are conflicting each other,
and only one can survive, whereas the other is thrown away as unreal.
However, as war erupts, fiction is generated, not the “real.” The real
is only to be born or carved out after the war’s end. In torture, the
body ceases to exists, and so does the world and the voice, and only the
sensation without any object prevails. In other words, what is real parishes forever.
In war, the “real” ceases to exist as the fighting nations “de-real” each other,
but only temporarily; the real is succumbing into the unreal/unmaking during the
war. After the war ends and when a victor or a “peace” stands strongly and proudly
again, a nation re-establishes its real and de-“de-real” the war. In other
words, after our war, we make the “unmade,” embodying the fiction again.
X and Y nations fight. During the fight, they de-real each other.
When X wins, it makes the fictions (that were generated at the dawn of the war
and during the war) real again. It becomes its own real that Y cannot de-real.
Nevertheless, war itself is a function of fiction; it leads to the
wing of unmaking. Each warrior justifies his fighting by three themes: “I kill”
– “I die” - “for my country.”
I Kill
I kill the other, the enemy, another human being, and I kill or get
rid of buildings, roads, dreams, and so on. This first action of war does not
build anything. It is totally and essentially nihilism-producing. I, as a soldier,
kill, so I produce vacuum. I produce nothing. This is not enough to make me fight.
No one wants to be nihilism-generator. Therefore, I, the soldier, add another
theme: I kill “for my country.” Then the killing I do does not generate
nothingness for the sake for nothingness, but it does so for giving “my country”
a chance to survive, to exist. Hence, my action of killing does not totally
fall into nihilism, but it creates, it makes something real, which is my country.
Now, let us compare two actions: greeting your friend in a street and killing
in a war. The former’s meaning is interior. You greet someone, so the meanings
of love, friendship, and amity emanate from this greeting itself. The greeting
is enough by itself to generate these meanings. Killing’s meanings, on the
other hand, are exterior to this action. I kill someone, but this action does
not generate the meaning of whatsoever by itself; I need “for my country” to
make the action of killing meaningful. The meaning of killing is exterior.
The action of killing, therefore, does not provide me, the soldier, with
stability. It does not serve as a referential point on which I can
trustfully lean. “To kill” does not make me sure of my existence, of my
realness.
I Die
The second theme is “I die.” I go to war to fight and die. When I
die, a citizen of this nation (my country) ceases to exist. I die, so there is no
more “my” country. Indeed, a nation is embodied in its material citizens’ bodies/body;
hence, the action of “to die” in a war is essentially against the notion of the
nation! “To die” unmakes the nation. It gets rids of the national body. Again, “I
die” does support me with a stable reference in which I can plant my meaning.
For My Country
The third theme is “for my country.” Even this theme is not enough to
serve as a stable reference of the Self that is engaged in war. As war ends,
peace (whatever type of peace) follows; this peace generally includes the
others whom I, the soldier, was fighting. They can become citizens in “my
country,” they can become my comrades in the army after they are defeated. A
new constitution can be written, and the enemy is suddenly not enemy anymore,
its killed soldiers are not deaths but victims of atrocities. “My country” for
which I die and kill will be conflated with the enemies. In sum, war produces referential
instability (p.121). This referential instability is the sign of war-as-unmaking
or of war-as-fiction-generating. Fiction and unmaking produce the “unreal,” as
we said before, and the “unreal” has no reference. Unmaking and imagination
lack sensation that can distinguish between things because there are no things
in the pure imagination and the pure-unmaking, there is only omnipresent object
without sensation. No things/objects, no reference.
Notes about Making
Making and unmaking are two entangled wings of our capacity as human
beings. Pain is the extreme and the most fundamental real “thing” that exists; that
is, it is generated in the body, making the body the most real ever, but without
an object. Pain then provides us, we the human beings, with the absolute sensation.
The absolute realness. Unmaking is the absolute object that lacks body or lacks
sensation. It is unreal. It struggles to be. Hence, imagination provides us
with Wish. This wish does not revoke an image of something; it is not an
image of your lover that you remember/miss; rather, it is the image of the absence
of your lover. Your lover exists no more, so you wish her/his existence. Wish
is the 2-D image compared to the absence of an object not to an object.
Wish and body have to meet. That is how making and unmaking are
transforming to each other (p.164). The result of their meeting is objects
or Artifact. Artifact, what we make, is born from the Wish’s need
of a body and the body’s needs of a wish. Wish needs body to be seen. Body
needs wish because the body actualizes its extreme value only by pain. Pain
should vanish (of course it must! It is pain.) How? By making it unreal. “[A]rtifact
is a conflated projection of the fact of physical pain (our body) and a
counterfactual wish (our gods), that itself makes the realness of pain unreal
by making the unrealness of the wish real (embodied)” (p.292, emphasis
added).
So, we live in the Artifact that is swinging between making and
unmaking. The relationship between human beings and the Artifact is double-folded
in nature: on the one hand, it is a projection as human beings, the
makers, make the artifact, and ensure the embodying of the Wish into the Body;
and on the other hand, it is a reciprocation, as the Artifact impacts
the makers, the human beings, and reshapes them. Reciprocation is well
expressed in this quotation: “[T]he object [or the artifact] is only a fulcrum
or lever across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and
remakes the makers” (p.307).
(Note: Politically speaking, liberalism can be framed as an
ideology focusing only on the projection type of the human-Artifact relation,
whereas communism focuses solely on the reciprocation relation.)
Two large Artifacts have dominated our life: God and the collective
economic system. God is the Wish that we have embodied in religious narratives.
God penetrates our body, the human being’s body, and exists through pain: punishment,
Christ/Cross, original sin, etc. All of these painful narratives have been created
to give God, the absolute Wish, the absolute imagination, a body. Pain is
chosen as the gate for God to enter the body because pain is the extreme
real experience someone can have. The collective economic system is similar. We,
the human beings, the makers, have made this huge system to embody our Wish into
money, production, and so on. So, the projection type of the human being-Artifact
manifests through God and Economics. However, the problem lies in the other nature
of this relation: reciprocation. The Artifact (God or Economics) does not reply
to its maker. God has never answered our prayers, nor has the economic system
made us equal or safe. The relationship between the Artifact and its makers is
imbalanced. What makes this problem worse is that the maker, the human being,
cannot stop producing the artifact or sustaining the projection relation with it.
This is the source of our suffering. “[T]he large Artifact (God in one, the
collective economic system in the other) continues to be a projection of human
capacities but has ceased to perform the counterpart of projection,
reciprocation: God does not answer prayers (the peoples' voices are heard
instead as godless murmuring and complaint); the economic system does not warm,
clothe, and feed (the peoples' voices are again heard as murmuring and
complaint rather than as an announcement from the creators themselves that a
problem in the interior structure of artifice has arisen)” (p.276).
In these paintings (Paintings by Millet. Source: Wikipedia), below, the book argues, we can see how the maker is melted with the Artifact. The bodies of the women and the man are almost melted in the environment where they work. In other words, the artist consciously or not expresses this “reciprocation” between the maker and the Artifact by melting the body’s boundaries with the environment.
