Contours of the Flesh : The Semiotics of Pain

This book works to make apparent the rhetorical play of pain demonstrating its social and political imperatives.

In the Eurowest pain is discursively framed as something that elides discourse and therefore is outside language. In this framing, pain, as outside language, is given asocial and ahistorical status understood to be beyond human construction. Indeed, played out in systems of belief and practice, pain acts as a medium for reciprocal relations with the metaphysical other since it too is understood as originating and sharing a part in the ''authentic'' or ''real'' from which the metaphysical, and therefore truth, is understood to emerge. Understood as part of this domain, pain is linked to truth and therefore understood to be a means to truth; hence the use of torture to secure the truth. With this kind of discursive framing, this book works to make apparent the rhetorical play of pain demonstrating its social and political imperatives.