Social Suffering: Pain, Language, and Communicability of Suffering

This paper illuminates the social nature of suffering. Since the publication of Elaine Scarry's influential work, The Body in Pain, in 1985, the private nature of bodily pain and its resistance to language have been subjects of much academic attention and discussion. This paper critically examines the premises of Scarry's concept of pain that resists language and representation. I argue that Scarry's notion of pain is based on the idea of a liberal self: a self that exists prior to and independently of society and language. In contrast to Scarry's emphasis on the private nature of pain, this study highlights the social nature of suffering, whose meaning is socially constructed and negotiated. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, I suggest that only those sufferings that are recognised and acknowledged within language games can have meaning as visible and valid sufferings. Contrary to being private, therefore, as Veena Das puts, one's pain always resides in another's body, which may or may not acknowledge and respond to one's pain language. Language in this point of view is less a tool for reference or representation than a medium that can prompt the emergence of an alternative "form of life" which can accommodate and respond to hitherto unrecognized sufferings.