The Thought of Pain and the Pain of Thought
Simon Morgan Wortham, Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis
Edinburgh University Press, 168pp, £70.00, ISBN 9780748692415
reviewed by Joel White
It was in the waiting room of a hospital that I first picked up Simon Morgan Wortham’s Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis. Surgery was looming around the corner. Pain, in its bodily, immanent and imminent sense, was on the mind. Before I began to read, pain, as situated between the body and the mind, the material and the ideal, the past and the future, was present in all its ignominious facets. In fact, the dualisms that the thought of pain or the pain of thought seemingly bridge, point to the locus of pain as mediatory; as that which lies between. If one was to draw a theoretical or conceptual thread through Morgan Wortham’s book (stitching it up, so to speak, post-op), then pain as precisely this mediatory position between two apparently dualistic terms would have to be highlighted. To think pain is to think relationality; to think relationality as the movement (be this temporal or otherwise) of pain through thought.
The book, and all that is outlined in it, is a testament to the author’s rigorous knowledge of the fields that he engages with: philosophy, politics, and psychoanalysis. If anything, though, the book is too rich in content. To count the number of philosophers, theorists, and psychoanalysts on one hand, to keep them all in mind, is a demanding, indeed, painful task. Inferring from the Acknowledgement, it would seem that this richness is due to the particular effect that occurs when articles and papers are placed together anew in book form. Whereas only two or three ideas are compared in each article, six chapters make for heavy work. The conceptual thread becomes hard to find, the needle to tie it all together even more so. This is not a criticism of the book. Rather, it necessitates a limit imposed on the review by the reviewer which can skew the book’s overall conclusions. It does recall, however, through the process of reviewing, how summarisation is always the malodorous task that sits between possibility and impossibility at the same time.
To give an overview, however, is possible. The book is divided into six chapters, ‘After Pains,’ ‘Distress I,’ ‘Distress II,’ ‘Pain of Debt, or, What We Owe to Retroactivity,’ ‘Survival of Cruelty,’ and ‘Grief-Substitutes, or, Why Melanie Klein Is So Funny.’ The Introduction, other than an introduction to the subsequent chapters outlined above, starts with a literary review of its own. It outlines those within the continental tradition that have dealt with the concept of evil post-9/11, in particular it compares Richard Bernstein’s Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (2002), Peter Dews’ The Idea of Evil (2007), and Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2002). The justification for this review is as follows, ‘it would be difficult not to think of many of the greatest contributions to modern European philosophy as connected in some way or other to questions of suffering, pain, and torment.’ Although both ‘radical evil’ and ‘theodicy’ are reviewed in this introduction, it is within the section of ‘radical evil’ that the most cogent argument for the possibility of pain arrives.
Paraphrasing Bernstein, Morgan Wortham writes: ‘If the human ‘will’ has an innate tendency to choose against the moral law, evil is not down simply for evil’s sake but is instead posited by Kant as a ground prior to every use of freedom in experience.’ He continues: ‘If philosophy is to counter simplistic cultural and political discourses of ‘evil’ of the kind that were aggressively promoted by the Bush regime in the wake of ‘9/11’…then it’s departure from a self-identically given concept of freedom (for instance, freedom as the great adversary of ‘evil’ on a worldwide scale) marks a welcome resistance to crude polarities.’ What must be taken from Morgan Wortham’s review is that the very the possibility of evil (and here I would like to emphatically add, along with the author, the possibility of pain) does not derive from a deficiency in reason ‘but exists as the prior ground of human freedom.’ The very possibility of pain is likewise the possibility of freedom.
What of the possibility of freedom then, and what of its relation to pain? This relation is most forcefully explored in the chapter ‘After Pains,’ where Morgan Wortham considers anew Ernst Junger’s text ‘On Pain’. Here, Morgan Wortham, extending Jeffrey Herf’s title Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (1984), works (although not explicitly) through the political, indeed ethical, possibilities that Kantian freedom accounts for. In other words, if freedom presupposes evil as much as respect for the moral law then it is always possible to conceive of a politics that can take a turn for the worse (German Fascism) as much as a turn for the better (for Walter Benjamin, at least, Russian communism). Pain therefore finds its place as precisely between these two possibilities. This mediatory position of pain is described as a contradiction that lies at the heart of Junger’s call for a soldierly and heroic affirmation of war-like pain. Morgan Wortham writes: ‘such reactionary politics [Junger’s] were therefore not only opposed to modernity but constituted precisely a form of modernism, in that they sought not so much to conserve or defend an already lost past as to create the conditions for the full realisation of this past for the first time; inventing its possibility anew.’ He continues: ‘the name that Junger albeit unwittingly gives this experience of contradiction is, one might venture, pain.’ Pain, then, is the contradictory experience of the present as the site in which a turn for the worse or a turn for the better are possible.
Pushing this contradiction further, Morgan Wortham expands upon the relation that this experience of pain has to a politics of time: ‘Indeed, the desire to extract pain from time, to restore it to its proper condition or state (namely the instantaneous experience of physical violence in war) connects to an anxiety or ambivalence about pain that Junger himself seek to repress, one that links in turn to the temporal structure of reactionary modernism that Peter Osborne describes in The Politics of Time (1995). For if pain of the Jungerian type is pitched against ‘sensitivity’ in all its (cultural) forms, then the question arises as to whether the truly heroic attitude relates to an intensified experience of pain or, just the opposite, its total overcoming.’ Morgan Wortham’s engagement with Osborne here is crucial. Other than once again cementing the importance of Osborne’s Politics of Time, the connection that Morgan Wortham makes between the experience of pain and the differing categories of time conceived within a philosophy of the political can be seen as a significant addition to this field. Morgan Wortham concludes: ‘Junger’s desire to extract pain from time, i.e. to affirm pain in the form of an instantaneous (warlike) experience of physical violence, is also evidence of the pain of time construed — on the basis of Junger’s own contradictory discourse.’
It is with the analysis of Walter Benjamin’s and Leo Strauss’s well known engagements with Junger (‘Theories of Post-war Fascism’ and ‘The living Issues of German Post war-Philosophies’), however, that the theoretical exploration of the pain of time comes to its most poignant conclusion. Specifically, here, pain is positioned between the loss of the past and the promise of the future. Morgan Wortham writes: ‘the rise of ultra-conservative reaction [Junger] represents a desperate response to the irrefutable loss of war as much as it testifies to the possibility of war’s total extension as such… In Benjamin’s eyes Junger represents a Germany incapable of capitalising on loss, as other nations had done.’ What should be taken from this analysis is that the future is constructed precisely through differing modalities of remembering this past. That is, the present, as the site of pain, structures the future anew through its engagement with the loss of the past. This allows for either a turn for the better or a turn for the worse. As Morgan Wortham wittingly concludes:
as the old saying goes, you don’t win the next war by fighting the last one – much less by evoking the qualities of war as ‘eternal and primeval,’ in a way that relies merely on the journalistic haste to capitalize from the actual present without grasping the past.
From Benjamin again, what must be performed is a certain modality of remembering that can engage with the pain of the present. This modality would then perform the old ‘Marxist trick’ of converting the warlike atmosphere of ultra-reactionary conservatism into the conditions for a socially transformative ‘civil war;’ a civil war that would lead ultimately to, as Benjamin eloquently puts it in his essay ‘Fate and Character’, the ‘not-yet realised condition of the just man.’
Moving from politics to psychoanalysis via chapters discussing topics as wide as Deleuze on sadomasochism, Nietzsche on the pain of debt, and Rancière and Lyotard on the sublime, Morgan Wortham finally arrives to Derrida and a chapter entitled ‘Survival of Cruelty.’ This chapter starts with what turns out to be a leading question: ‘What, after all, is cruelty… How would this relationship, this “affair,” manifest itself? What is the relation, for instance, not only of psychoanalysis to cruelty, but of psychoanalysis and cruelty?’ These questions are posed most directly at a specifically Freudian psychoanalysis (be that via Lacan) and derive their direction from a particular reading of Derrida’s essay ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of the Soul,’ an essay in which Derrida himself ‘confesses or professes his deep uncertainty’ about the meaning of the terms cruelty, sovereignty, and resistance. Leaning on the relation opened up by Derrida’s own enquiry into — paraphrasing Morgan Wortham — ‘what, after all, is meaning,’ Morgan Wortham argues that the term cruelty resists definition. Or, put differently, he offers a definition of cruelty as precisely that which resists: ‘Made to mean: the irreducible cruelty, perhaps, of meaning itself (wherein the ‘resistance’ by which the term ‘cruelty’ resists ‘meaning’ itself participates in this same problem, a problem of cruelty perhaps).’
Is this ambiguous cruelty, the cruelty that resists meaning, the same cruelty which psychoanalysis takes as its object of inquiry; the object that finds itself in the leading proposition, ‘cruelty and psychoanalysis’? Inexplicitly, it would seem so. As Morgan Wortham writes, ‘one would be hard pushed to say that there is a fully worked out theory in Freud that goes overtly by the name or under the heading Cruelty.’ With no ‘fully’ worked out theory, that is, other than the relation that cruelty has to revenge, cruelty would seem to remain as that which resists. Morgan Wortham writes of this relation, doubling revenge and cruelty back on themselves so to avoid definitional stability and retain ambiguity. He writes: ‘the fact that cruel impulses arise from the ‘instinct for mastery’ implies that cruelty — even infant cruelty — is always motivated.’ As such, and in general, cruelty and revenge therefore couple together only as non-identical doubles, a ‘doubleness’ that Morgan Wortham suggests announces ‘the enigmatic presence or quality of cruelty itself.’ But, again, what of this doubling, what of the doubles relationship to both pain and cruelty? Is there really ‘no discourse other than psychoanalysis’ that stands ready ‘to take an interest’ in cruelty, indeed, in pain?
Here, between cruelty’s doubles I would like to question whether the preclusion of a certain French writer, namely Antonin Artaud and his work of 1938, The Theatre and Its Double, is purposeful. One would hope so. A couple of pages later into the chapter, summarising cruelty’s relationship to what I would like to call the pain of meaning, Morgan Wortham writes, ‘the very idea of the definition, delimitation, or determination of the identity of a term by dint of opposition now seems to have been abandoned… Indeed, in a seemingly endless procession of mutations which perhaps help define cruelty’s spectacle, its perhaps indispensable theatricality…politics is added to the list of cruelty’s doubles … Law too enters as another of cruelty’s doubles.’ Perhaps then, if we were to define another ‘discourse’ that stands ready to take an interest in cruelty it would be the theatre. Is not Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ precisely that which resists meaning and that which attempts to transform, always mutating that which claims to be stable? Does not Artaud deem the experience of pain, the necessity of pain, as thoughts’ movement through the coexistence of the body and the mind, of the past and the future?
Artaud writes, ‘the real pain is to feel one's thought shift within oneself.’ Perhaps what is most glaringly absent from Artaud’s line (in as much as Artaud is glaringly absent from the book itself) is the word ‘modern.’ As always with that which is absent, its absence marks a certain presence. Would it indeed make sense, though, if ‘one’s thought’ was altered to ‘modern thought,’ so that that the line read, ‘the real pain is to feel modern thought shift within itself’? Put differently, does Artaud’s line (to use that well versed trope) always already pertain to a thinking of modernity; with modernity then defined as that which, as he says, ‘shifts within itself?’
The book, and all that is outlined in it, is a testament to the author’s rigorous knowledge of the fields that he engages with: philosophy, politics, and psychoanalysis. If anything, though, the book is too rich in content. To count the number of philosophers, theorists, and psychoanalysts on one hand, to keep them all in mind, is a demanding, indeed, painful task. Inferring from the Acknowledgement, it would seem that this richness is due to the particular effect that occurs when articles and papers are placed together anew in book form. Whereas only two or three ideas are compared in each article, six chapters make for heavy work. The conceptual thread becomes hard to find, the needle to tie it all together even more so. This is not a criticism of the book. Rather, it necessitates a limit imposed on the review by the reviewer which can skew the book’s overall conclusions. It does recall, however, through the process of reviewing, how summarisation is always the malodorous task that sits between possibility and impossibility at the same time.
To give an overview, however, is possible. The book is divided into six chapters, ‘After Pains,’ ‘Distress I,’ ‘Distress II,’ ‘Pain of Debt, or, What We Owe to Retroactivity,’ ‘Survival of Cruelty,’ and ‘Grief-Substitutes, or, Why Melanie Klein Is So Funny.’ The Introduction, other than an introduction to the subsequent chapters outlined above, starts with a literary review of its own. It outlines those within the continental tradition that have dealt with the concept of evil post-9/11, in particular it compares Richard Bernstein’s Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (2002), Peter Dews’ The Idea of Evil (2007), and Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2002). The justification for this review is as follows, ‘it would be difficult not to think of many of the greatest contributions to modern European philosophy as connected in some way or other to questions of suffering, pain, and torment.’ Although both ‘radical evil’ and ‘theodicy’ are reviewed in this introduction, it is within the section of ‘radical evil’ that the most cogent argument for the possibility of pain arrives.
Paraphrasing Bernstein, Morgan Wortham writes: ‘If the human ‘will’ has an innate tendency to choose against the moral law, evil is not down simply for evil’s sake but is instead posited by Kant as a ground prior to every use of freedom in experience.’ He continues: ‘If philosophy is to counter simplistic cultural and political discourses of ‘evil’ of the kind that were aggressively promoted by the Bush regime in the wake of ‘9/11’…then it’s departure from a self-identically given concept of freedom (for instance, freedom as the great adversary of ‘evil’ on a worldwide scale) marks a welcome resistance to crude polarities.’ What must be taken from Morgan Wortham’s review is that the very the possibility of evil (and here I would like to emphatically add, along with the author, the possibility of pain) does not derive from a deficiency in reason ‘but exists as the prior ground of human freedom.’ The very possibility of pain is likewise the possibility of freedom.
What of the possibility of freedom then, and what of its relation to pain? This relation is most forcefully explored in the chapter ‘After Pains,’ where Morgan Wortham considers anew Ernst Junger’s text ‘On Pain’. Here, Morgan Wortham, extending Jeffrey Herf’s title Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (1984), works (although not explicitly) through the political, indeed ethical, possibilities that Kantian freedom accounts for. In other words, if freedom presupposes evil as much as respect for the moral law then it is always possible to conceive of a politics that can take a turn for the worse (German Fascism) as much as a turn for the better (for Walter Benjamin, at least, Russian communism). Pain therefore finds its place as precisely between these two possibilities. This mediatory position of pain is described as a contradiction that lies at the heart of Junger’s call for a soldierly and heroic affirmation of war-like pain. Morgan Wortham writes: ‘such reactionary politics [Junger’s] were therefore not only opposed to modernity but constituted precisely a form of modernism, in that they sought not so much to conserve or defend an already lost past as to create the conditions for the full realisation of this past for the first time; inventing its possibility anew.’ He continues: ‘the name that Junger albeit unwittingly gives this experience of contradiction is, one might venture, pain.’ Pain, then, is the contradictory experience of the present as the site in which a turn for the worse or a turn for the better are possible.
Pushing this contradiction further, Morgan Wortham expands upon the relation that this experience of pain has to a politics of time: ‘Indeed, the desire to extract pain from time, to restore it to its proper condition or state (namely the instantaneous experience of physical violence in war) connects to an anxiety or ambivalence about pain that Junger himself seek to repress, one that links in turn to the temporal structure of reactionary modernism that Peter Osborne describes in The Politics of Time (1995). For if pain of the Jungerian type is pitched against ‘sensitivity’ in all its (cultural) forms, then the question arises as to whether the truly heroic attitude relates to an intensified experience of pain or, just the opposite, its total overcoming.’ Morgan Wortham’s engagement with Osborne here is crucial. Other than once again cementing the importance of Osborne’s Politics of Time, the connection that Morgan Wortham makes between the experience of pain and the differing categories of time conceived within a philosophy of the political can be seen as a significant addition to this field. Morgan Wortham concludes: ‘Junger’s desire to extract pain from time, i.e. to affirm pain in the form of an instantaneous (warlike) experience of physical violence, is also evidence of the pain of time construed — on the basis of Junger’s own contradictory discourse.’
It is with the analysis of Walter Benjamin’s and Leo Strauss’s well known engagements with Junger (‘Theories of Post-war Fascism’ and ‘The living Issues of German Post war-Philosophies’), however, that the theoretical exploration of the pain of time comes to its most poignant conclusion. Specifically, here, pain is positioned between the loss of the past and the promise of the future. Morgan Wortham writes: ‘the rise of ultra-conservative reaction [Junger] represents a desperate response to the irrefutable loss of war as much as it testifies to the possibility of war’s total extension as such… In Benjamin’s eyes Junger represents a Germany incapable of capitalising on loss, as other nations had done.’ What should be taken from this analysis is that the future is constructed precisely through differing modalities of remembering this past. That is, the present, as the site of pain, structures the future anew through its engagement with the loss of the past. This allows for either a turn for the better or a turn for the worse. As Morgan Wortham wittingly concludes:
as the old saying goes, you don’t win the next war by fighting the last one – much less by evoking the qualities of war as ‘eternal and primeval,’ in a way that relies merely on the journalistic haste to capitalize from the actual present without grasping the past.
From Benjamin again, what must be performed is a certain modality of remembering that can engage with the pain of the present. This modality would then perform the old ‘Marxist trick’ of converting the warlike atmosphere of ultra-reactionary conservatism into the conditions for a socially transformative ‘civil war;’ a civil war that would lead ultimately to, as Benjamin eloquently puts it in his essay ‘Fate and Character’, the ‘not-yet realised condition of the just man.’
Moving from politics to psychoanalysis via chapters discussing topics as wide as Deleuze on sadomasochism, Nietzsche on the pain of debt, and Rancière and Lyotard on the sublime, Morgan Wortham finally arrives to Derrida and a chapter entitled ‘Survival of Cruelty.’ This chapter starts with what turns out to be a leading question: ‘What, after all, is cruelty… How would this relationship, this “affair,” manifest itself? What is the relation, for instance, not only of psychoanalysis to cruelty, but of psychoanalysis and cruelty?’ These questions are posed most directly at a specifically Freudian psychoanalysis (be that via Lacan) and derive their direction from a particular reading of Derrida’s essay ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of the Soul,’ an essay in which Derrida himself ‘confesses or professes his deep uncertainty’ about the meaning of the terms cruelty, sovereignty, and resistance. Leaning on the relation opened up by Derrida’s own enquiry into — paraphrasing Morgan Wortham — ‘what, after all, is meaning,’ Morgan Wortham argues that the term cruelty resists definition. Or, put differently, he offers a definition of cruelty as precisely that which resists: ‘Made to mean: the irreducible cruelty, perhaps, of meaning itself (wherein the ‘resistance’ by which the term ‘cruelty’ resists ‘meaning’ itself participates in this same problem, a problem of cruelty perhaps).’
Is this ambiguous cruelty, the cruelty that resists meaning, the same cruelty which psychoanalysis takes as its object of inquiry; the object that finds itself in the leading proposition, ‘cruelty and psychoanalysis’? Inexplicitly, it would seem so. As Morgan Wortham writes, ‘one would be hard pushed to say that there is a fully worked out theory in Freud that goes overtly by the name or under the heading Cruelty.’ With no ‘fully’ worked out theory, that is, other than the relation that cruelty has to revenge, cruelty would seem to remain as that which resists. Morgan Wortham writes of this relation, doubling revenge and cruelty back on themselves so to avoid definitional stability and retain ambiguity. He writes: ‘the fact that cruel impulses arise from the ‘instinct for mastery’ implies that cruelty — even infant cruelty — is always motivated.’ As such, and in general, cruelty and revenge therefore couple together only as non-identical doubles, a ‘doubleness’ that Morgan Wortham suggests announces ‘the enigmatic presence or quality of cruelty itself.’ But, again, what of this doubling, what of the doubles relationship to both pain and cruelty? Is there really ‘no discourse other than psychoanalysis’ that stands ready ‘to take an interest’ in cruelty, indeed, in pain?
Here, between cruelty’s doubles I would like to question whether the preclusion of a certain French writer, namely Antonin Artaud and his work of 1938, The Theatre and Its Double, is purposeful. One would hope so. A couple of pages later into the chapter, summarising cruelty’s relationship to what I would like to call the pain of meaning, Morgan Wortham writes, ‘the very idea of the definition, delimitation, or determination of the identity of a term by dint of opposition now seems to have been abandoned… Indeed, in a seemingly endless procession of mutations which perhaps help define cruelty’s spectacle, its perhaps indispensable theatricality…politics is added to the list of cruelty’s doubles … Law too enters as another of cruelty’s doubles.’ Perhaps then, if we were to define another ‘discourse’ that stands ready to take an interest in cruelty it would be the theatre. Is not Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ precisely that which resists meaning and that which attempts to transform, always mutating that which claims to be stable? Does not Artaud deem the experience of pain, the necessity of pain, as thoughts’ movement through the coexistence of the body and the mind, of the past and the future?
Artaud writes, ‘the real pain is to feel one's thought shift within oneself.’ Perhaps what is most glaringly absent from Artaud’s line (in as much as Artaud is glaringly absent from the book itself) is the word ‘modern.’ As always with that which is absent, its absence marks a certain presence. Would it indeed make sense, though, if ‘one’s thought’ was altered to ‘modern thought,’ so that that the line read, ‘the real pain is to feel modern thought shift within itself’? Put differently, does Artaud’s line (to use that well versed trope) always already pertain to a thinking of modernity; with modernity then defined as that which, as he says, ‘shifts within itself?’