The K renders pain and trauma unspeakable – rejecting this dialogue only proliferates imageries of suffering – turns the k

This atomistic model of individual human beings with their unique interior landscapes translates into the fundamental unsayability of pain, and the failure of pain to take an object means that we can only approach the pain of others with doubt. For Scarry (1985: 4), ‘pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed’. Here, the possibilities for accurately or meaningfully expressing pain are always subject to the ever-present threat of their negation. As physical pain is seen to destroy the possibility of its own expression in language, the options for representing pain are limited to a range of visual practices that can only ever point to some trace – some visible cause that might point to the presence of pain in another (i.e. the emaciated body in starvation, the torn and bleeding body in war, the contorted face of the prisoner at Abu Ghraib). In this sense, the drive to image the pain of others seeks to impart a certainty to experience that, in the Cartesian model, can ever only be marked by a radical doubt. It is from within the frame of doubt associated with pain that the drive to visualize correlative expressions of pain – rather than the pain itself – occurs. For this reason, the visual expression of pain and trauma translates into a politics of representation that flattens the experience of pain by being able to capture only the visible causes or expressions of pain. One of the results of this is the development of an aesthetic imagery of pain-causing phenomena – an iconography of symbols that stand in for pain and thus become the representational alibis for actual pain: images of starvation, of emaciated concentration-camp victims, of hooded prisoners, of broken and bleeding skins, of blood-stained floors in prison cells, and so on. In the imaging of pain-causing phenomena and of bodies in pain, the specificity of the interior experience of pain, and of the subject that experiences it, is elided or even entirely evacuated. People become representations of their plights. As Feldman argues, we encounter ‘generalities of bodies – dead, wounded, starving, diseased, and homeless. . . . In their pervasive depersonalization, [they appear as an] anonymous corporeality’ (cited in Malkki, 1996: 388). The fundamental inexpressibility of pain is the unsaid hypothesis on which a range of claims about torture, war, and death as primarily interior experiences (and thus doubtable experiences) are made possible. For Hannah Arendt, for example, the concentration-camp survivor, had he been able to return to narrate his experience, would not have been believed. The suffering in the camp as a space of profound and potentially limitless pain is understood to defy attempts at narration, because the capacity to express the content of that pain is understood to be severely curtailed. Arendt uses terms such as ‘unimaginable’ to describe experiences that ‘can never be fully embraced by the imagination’, and that, as a consequence, can ‘never be fully reported’. In short, ‘it is as though [the survivor] had a story to tell of another planet’ (Arendt, 2000: 125). Similarly, she writes that ‘anyone speaking or writing about the concentration camps is . . . regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned to the world of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with regard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for reality’ (Arendt, 2000: 120). Here, we see that pain and trauma are regarded as so fundamentally inaccessible and unshareable that any attempt at recounting one’s experiences is haunted by the stark fact that one’s suffering will always and necessarily be received by others with radical doubt. The poverty of communicating traumatic experience was also expressed by Walter Benjamin, who suggests that ‘witnessing war . . . takes away the ability to speak about it’ (cited in Sliwinski, 2004: 151). Jenny Edkins (2003: 8) expresses a similar understanding with regard to trauma, writing that ‘what we can say no longer makes sense; what we want to say, we can’t. There are no words for it.’ Similarly, the act of witnessing others’ pain (and deaths) is also fraught with an unsayability, because the witness is limited to only a modicum of access to the trauma of the other body.  To be sure, there is an ethical imperative here to mark the experience of trauma as both unique and exceptional – an imperative that, for all its ethical motivations, also works to further divide the pain-filled from the pain-less. Here, the witnessing of pain, because it is marked by the inability of the witness to experience the pain of the other body, can ever only be a partial witnessing. This is Levi’s (1989) formulation of the differentiation between the drowned and the saved. The drowned cannot come back to bear witness to what happened to them, and the saved are capable of only a partial witnessing. Of course, the possibility of perfect witnessing – of perfect affinity between the one who experiences pain and the one who witnesses it – is not only impossible, but also probably undesirable. The reasons for this undesirability are found not in the impossibility of experiencing the pain of the other, but rather in the immanent risk that the pain of others might be evacuated – through a refocusing on the self – from the realm of politics.