Keeping quiet: Performing pain

Abstract

In this chapter, I address one dimension of a larger project concerned with speaking pain against the grain of its presumed unspeakability.1 Here, continuing to think through one interview encounter, I’d like to consider that not-speaking or keeping quiet in the particular sense of tending silence may be a way of realizing the relational subjectivity of pain. In this account, pain shares with language a certain fickleness. Speaking pain is dangerous. It may cause more pain by, for instance, inadvertently contributing to discourses that tend to dismiss it or by inviting others into a relation of practical suffering. Accordingly, speaking pain is a performative correlate for what happens between subjects facing pain whether “on a smooth hard resistant surface of a mirror” or “in the tissues of the flesh of the world” (Oliver, p. 221). The space between must then be carefully kept, swept and brushed, maintained, not so much against the unspeakability of pain but against the potential excesses of speech, the possibility of overspeaking it and violating the tender space it opens.