COURSE POSTER

» Download PDF 178816kb

DESCRIPTION

What does pain mean? This class will investigate the uses of pain in the contemporary world, and in doing so, it will approach various sites where pain matters, examining different discursive practices which attempt to speak of pain - or alternatively, claim that pain is what cannot be spoken. We will discuss the experience of the body in pain and the relation of pain to knowledge. In the interest of interdisciplinarity, it is anticipated that guest lecturers in neurophysiology will participate, as well as those from, for example, Amnesty International. Topics to be addressed will include pain in a medical context; torture and the political uses of pain; the relation between pain and privation; the expressibility of pain. Ultimately, the aim of the class is towards the question of the uses of pain in legitimizing art: we will examine two archetypes of “the tortured artist”, Sylvia Plath and Jackson Pollock, and will inquire into recent theories of the sublime in art which stress the conjunction of pleasure and pain in the most heightened and extreme aesthetic experiences.