Violence and War in Culture and the Media

15   Making the pain count

Embodied politics in the new age ofterror

Gillian Youngs

… go to the theatre if you want catharsis, go to literature, don't go to the camps. Nothing comes out of the camps. Nothing.

Words of the daughter of a holocaust survivor towards the end of the filmThe Reader – Hare 2008)

Introduction: pain and embodied politics

Where does pain go, politically speaking? How does the force of it drain out of the public sphere? How could it be different, and what are the conceptual and theoretical tools that might help it to be so? These are the kinds of questions at the heart of this contribution and the term ‘heart’ is used here in a deliberate sense. For, as we all know the heart is the symbolic reference for the worlds of feeling, ...