Elaine Scarry

One of the best known and most widely accepted premises regarding the experience of pain and suffering is its singular, private nature. Pain’s violence isolates us from everything else, embedding us completely within our own suffering so that there is nothing else but pain: no world or objects, no relationship with other people, no past or anticipation of the future. An utter withdrawal. But pain’s isolating force is dual: it affects not only those who suffer, but also those who are not in pain. Thus, it is precisely in pain – the exemplary state in which we need others with us to offer their help and sympathy – that we find ourselves in solitude; and it is precisely in the state of pain that we leave others to suffer alone. 

Posthuman Suffering investigates the core assumptions of posthumanist discourse via philosophy, cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory, and close textual and filmic readings of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Don DeLillo's White Noise and Steven Spielberg's film, AI: Artificial Intelligence, bringing the more ontological and epistemological implications of posthumanism to the forefront. In the age of technology our own limitations are legitimized as unique to the human condition.

Delbo is known for the mantra that defines her work: il faut donner à voir. Accordingly, scholarship has focused on the visual imagery in the three volumes that were eventually published as Auschwitz et après. However, Delbo often demonstrates the limits to visually figurative language within the work itself. Her repeated expressions, “Essayez de regarder. Essayez pour voir,” become confrontations, rather than exhortations to the reader, who can never fully imagine the experience. This article examines the understudied role of auditory imagery in Delbo’s Auschwitz et après and discusses the limits of visually figurative language in her work. I analyze two essential elements of Delbo’s auditory imagery: the mimetic perception demanded by the guttural cries in her prose as well as the delayed auditory sensory content produced in her poetic sections. The article concludes with a discussion of Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the self as a resonance chamber, which sheds light on the existential role of the auditory in Delbo’s testimonial strategy. Bearing witness to extreme suffering in Delbo’s work demands a careful mental listening to remedy insufficient mental looking.

Philosophical interest in vulnerability focusses mainly on normative questions concerning its relevance for moral, political and legal theory. However, beneath these questions there lies another one which is epistemological: How do we gain clear knowledge about another person’s pain and suffering? How do we recognize a wounded life? Drawing primarily on the account of Elaine Scarry (1984), the article aims at showing that the difficulties to apprehend and recognize a life as injured are not only grounded in political and cultural frames, as Judith Butler contends, but also in the phenomenological and epistemic features of pain itself. Pain is epistemically fragile. Whereas it is almost impossible to ignore one’s own pain, it is very easy to overlook the pain of others. This epistemic slope has concrete effects on the social and political life. Regarding vulnerability, the normative question of recognition and the epistemic question of recognizability, thus, are closely intertwined.

The “crisis in the humanities,” whether unprecedented and dire or perpetual and overblown, has subtle effects on how we understand and talk about our own work on a daily basis. Precarious terms of employment encourage us to describe our work in market-friendly terminology such as “effective” or  “innovative” rather than using supposedly softer, vaguer concepts such as beauty.  Yet beauty isn’t just the window-dressing of academia, the leafy paths and grand architecture of our campuses. It is central to the endeavor, and, once brought into the light, a powerful organizing principle of teaching and learning. This article explores four such areas: motivation to teach and learn, critical thinking, integrative learning, and diversity/difference.

A philosophical exploration of engagement in art, elaborating on the work of Susanne K. Langer. Five interconnected essays address the role of art and the artist in society, conceptual and performance art, beauty and the gaze, aestheticism, and the cultural politics of the art-world. It contains extensive discussions of the work of, among others, Andy Warhol, Derek Jarman, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wolfgang Tillmans, Anthony Goicolea, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and draws upon the work of Arthur Danto, Roland Barthes, and Elaine Scarry.

This article examines the depiction in Pat Barker's Regeneration of Dr. Lewis Yealland, notorious First World War disciplinary therapist. I demonstrate how Barker attunes her novel to contemporary discourses of torture and witnessing in order to update a long tradition of opposing Yealland with his contemporary, Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, putting Regeneration at the intersection of lively debates about trauma, psychoanalysis, and the psychology of torture.

This article examines the well-known though contested stance of Elaine Scarry regarding the inability to express our pain. Reviewing the problem shows that certain practices (scientific, judicial, medical) communicate the pain objectively. But when transmitting our pain becomes challenging, one important solution is found in Scarry’s suggested use of linguistic agents. These agents represent the felt pain, whether in actual (a stabbing nail, an electric shock) or imaginative forms (‘like a ball that keeps falling down on you’), enabling us to convey an otherwise unconceivable torturous experience. As elements distinguished from the hurting body, they create a spatial separation that produces the necessary distance for safely projecting the pain on to something other than oneself. Historians strongly criticize Scarry’s ‘ontological’ account, but in drawing on experimental laboratory work for discussing this reality-conferring function of language, the article addresses clinicians, neuroscientists, and healthcare workers in order to expose new perspectives for pain research.

Military and humanitarian interventions have become common- place in recent years, provoking some to suggest that the right to intervene in the face of an emergency has become a new global norm. Emergencies and interventions pose unique challenges for political and legal theories of sovereignty, legitimacy, and democracy. Political anthropologists and other social scientists have focused on critiques of sovereign power and military and humanitarian interventions, but more attention to the cultural aspects of how emergencies operate and to the positive and negative effects they might have on political and social life is needed.

Which conceptions of solidarity will help subjugated, oppressed groups pose liberatory challenges to the regimes under which they suffer? Activists and scholars concerned with liberation err by constraining solidarity to the parameters outlined in conventional moral and political theory and, therefore, by imagining solidarity as dependent on models of identity and shared interests. Organized movements may aim for expanded access to institutional claims and for cultural representation, and yet liberatory movements also have more specific objectives: to challenge the legitimacy of oppressive political and moral regimes, and to put those regimes in the obediential service of the vulnerable and oppressed. I critique notions of solidarity conceived in political philosophy as shared interests, and as a functions of identity in discourses about anti-racist, feminist, and pro-indigenous movements for social justice and cultural inclusion. Using the works of Enrique Dussel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Elaine Scarry, I argue that a notion of solidarity developed as a relational concept, primarily as a reference to the laborious activities of relating, can serve as a resource for liberatory projects once we describe the three main ideas as a coherent proposition: liberatory solidarity as relational. The concept refers to when individuals and groups continue to relate, to make one another, for the purposes of liberation despite countervailing exploitative power relations, incentives, and disincentives. Those seeking emancipatory change either labor to relate for the sake of liberation, or preserve the bigger-picture status quo in which disparate and episodic enclave movements rise and fall on the terms set by identity politics and fictive individualistic autonomy.

Cancellation is a public execution, during which a person is pilloried and destroyed. But while we have become used to the cycle of manufactured outrage that preludes every cancellation, the desperate public apologies, and the devastating consequences for the people whose lives are ruined, we are often at a loss to know what we could do to stop this type of serial assault. Part of the solution is to gain as clear an understanding of the phenomenon as possible by probing its structure. Philosophical and historical scholarship on public executions and torture can help to illuminate the moral logic that drives the cycle of abuse.

My aim is to give an account of what Diarmuid Costello (2005) in ‘Aura, Face, Photography : re-reading Benjamin today’, describes as Benjamin’s ‘mature conception of aura’ (Costello 2005, p. 166). In Part One I discuss aura in regards to experience and with regards to the autonomous stature of nature and artworks. My intention is first, to connect Benjamin’s mature philosophical concept of aura and the autonomous stature of artworks with the structure of perceptual experience and second to highlight, as Benjamin does, the refrain of “what is at stake” regarding how we collectively experience and achieve access to the world.

In Part Two, I connect the experiential, relational aspects of aura with the phenomenological approach of this study. I suggest the surfacing of involuntary memories and the exact yet fleeting and momentary instances of affect and beauty contribute to the sensing of auratic atmospheres. In a reciprocal fashion, I propose that auratic atmospheres are composed, in part, of and by somatically registered sensations. I describe atmosphere as contributing to the matrix of auratic relations, suggesting, therefore, that an artwork’s aura and atmosphere are co-implicated and co-extensive. 

This essay is the third chapter of Mirrored Resonance: exploring an aesthetics of engagement (MFA exegesis 2017).

Alexander Kluge's 'Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike' (2008) is a massive film essay that explores Sergei Eisenstein's unrealised film of Marx's 'Kapital'. In this essay, a number of interconnections between the three texts (Kluge, Eisenstein, Marx) are explored to show how Kluge's film illustrates both Marx and Eisenstein's relevance today.
The essay was published by Lokaal 01 (Breda, NL) as part of its 'theoretical space' ('Theoretische Ruimte': ThRu) to accompany an exhibition project.

Counter-scripting the Body in Pain, An Artistic Interrogation into Pain as Practice, Site, and Subversive Force conceptualises and enacts forms of resistance to the human tendency to negate pain, drawing on methods and sensibilities specific to artistic knowledge and practice. Through a series of text-based artworks, this project offers alternative modes for probing, perceiving, and understanding chronic pain, challenging dominant socio-cultural attitudes that regard pain as something to avoid or resist. The tripartite series: May and the Potentiality of Pain (2014-2015); It’s Always Three O’clock in the Morning (2016); and Gibraltar, A Walk with Disturbance (2017) are at the centre of an exploration into the motifs pain as practice, site, and subversive force. The artworks were created in tandem with an ethical strategy for art pursued through an experimental art-writing strategy I have labelled counter-scripting. Elaborating and engineering affect through performance, the art texts of the three artworks challenge dominant individual and cultural tendencies to explain, suppress, and ultimately annihilate pain.

RESUMO

A investigação dos registros íntimos, já carregada de sentidos múltiplos, torna-se ainda mais rica quando se depara com relatos das dores de seus autores. Seja física seja emocional, a dor carrega consigo um caráter indizível e, conforme lembra a pesquisadora estadunidense da dor Elaine Scarry (1987), de destruição da linguagem. A partir de um estudo genealógico do meio do diário e das estruturas sociais e culturais que o formaram, o trabalho pretende encontrar, no cerne dessa forma de expressão, o termo romântico alemão Erlebnis, ou vivência. É realizada também uma análise da escrita, vista como uma atividade solitária, mas que se completa no encontro com o outro, como diz Vilém Flusser (2010). A dor em si é descrita a partir da literatura médica que buscou compreendê-la e expressá-la, ainda de maneira incipiente. Percebe-se que a dor persiste numa mescla de presença e ausência, cuja tradução no papel realiza-se por meio de palavras ou imagens, insuficientes, mas buscam se aproximam ao máximo do sentimento original e único, referente àquela experiência irrepetível. Essas expressões, finalmente, são encontradas e recortadas de dois diários, o do crítico Roland Barthes (1915-1980) e o da pintora mexicana Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), ambos lidam, respectivamente, com o luto da perda da mãe e as dores crônicas de todo uma vida. Neles, foram encontradas imagens que traduzem a presença-ausência da dor, comprovam o caráter limitado da língua e, mais ainda, mostram que o diário é, ainda que não de maneira totalizante, um excelente campo para as fulguras das vivências dolorosas.

Palavras-chave: Diário; Dor; Estética; Frida Kahlo; Roland Barthes.

ABSTRACT

The research on personal records is full of meanings but becomes even richer when presented with descriptions of the author's pains. Whether it presents itself as physical or emotional, pain carries a feature of unutterability within and – as reminded by the American researcher of pain Elaine Scarry (1987) – of language destruction as well. From a genealogical study of the diary. From a genealogical study of the diary and the social and cultural structures from which it emerged, this work aims to find the German romantic term Erlebnis [experience] within the kernel of this form of expression. It also analyzes writing, which is seen as a lonely activity that fulfills itself when meeting the other - as Vilém Flusser (2010) said. The description of pain comes from the medical literature that tried to comprehend and express it, though incipiently. It is perceived that pain lies in a compound of presence and absence translated by insufficient words and images, which intend to be as close as possible to the original and singular feeling related to that unrepeatable experience. Finally, those expressions are found and taken from two diaries, namely, the one written by the French literary critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980), which depicts the loss of his mother, and the one possessed by the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1945), which portrays a chronicle pain that lasted a lifetime. In them were found images that translate the presence-absence of pain, prove the limited power of language and further show that the diary is an excellent setting for the blazes of painful experiences.

Keywords: Diary; Pain; Aesthetics; Frida Kahlo; Roland Barthes.

Which conceptions of solidarity will help subjugated, oppressed groups pose liberatory challenges to the regimes under which they suffer? Activists and scholars concerned with liberation err by constraining solidarity to the parameters outlined in conventional moral and political theory and, therefore, by imagining solidarity as dependent on models of identity and shared interests. Organized movements may aim for expanded access to institutional claims and for cultural representation, and yet liberatory movements also have more specific objectives: to challenge the legitimacy of oppressive political and moral regimes, and to put those regimes in the obediential service of the vulnerable and oppressed. I critique notions of solidarity conceived in political philosophy as shared interests, and as a functions of identity in discourses about antiracist, feminist, and pro-indigenous movements for social justice and cultural inclusion. Using the works of Enrique Dussel, Karl Marx, Friedri...

This article calls into question two core suppositions of ''The Body in Pain'': that pain is sheerly aversive; and that those who inflict pain do so unawares. I argue that these pieties avoid disturbing questions regarding the pain-filled body. The controlled experience of pain is central to any number of practices; many of them place the body in extremis. Conversely, there are practices of pain-infliction undertaken with the expectation of gratification or social validation. Pain, in short, is alluring as well as aversive.

Elaine Scarry’s brilliant work on bodily pain shows signs of its age with its unassuming allegiance to a humanist exceptionalism that recognizes “bodies” only in the form of human bodies. With the posthumanist turn in literary studies, we must acknowledge the possibilities of reading nonhuman pain, not only in the realm of nonhuman animals but also in the vegetal kingdom, especially in light of the advancing science of the cognitive behaviors attributable to “plant-thinking,” to use philosopher Michael Marder’s term. I contend that paying attention to vegetal affect in texts and in the world opens interpretative doors toward re-theorizing bodily pain in more-than-human contexts. In her discussion of tool-making, Scarry considers the human body “sentient” but the body of a tree as “nonsentient surface” (The Body in Pain, 175-76). She sees the “marks on a series of trees” to alter human sentience “without hurting,” as human sentience is projected into these “intentional objects” that, from a botanical perspective, are actually living beings. I read Scarry’s theories of sensation alongside Marder’s notion of vegetal “non-conscious intentionality,” as well as Steven Shaviro’s divergent view that “living organisms, beyond and beneath their cognitive accomplishments, exhibit something like nonintentional sentience” (Discognition, 18). Scarry emphasizes the importance of human “voice” in relation to constructions of “self” and “world,” but her claim that physical pain “annihilates language and consciousness” must be re-evaluated with respect to nonhuman language and consciousness, which, though maybe silent to human ears, still constitute the making of sentient selves and worlds within our shared spaces of existence (54).

Özet Bir metin oluştururken yazarın çektiği zorlukların başında, metinde yer alan kurgusal dünyayı okuyucunun zihninde oluşturma güçlüğü gelir. Çok bilinen bir yer anlatıldığında bile bahsi geçen yer, yazarın imgeleminden süzülerek yeni bir hâl alır. Dolayısıyla kurgusal metinlerdeki her bir canlandırma, okuyucuya uzak yeni bir dünyanın sunumudur. Üstelik yazarın bu dünyayı durağan bir şekilde resmetmesi de yeterli değildir. İyi yazardan beklenen şey, okuyucunun zihninde canlı imgeler oluşturmasıdır. Elaine Scarry, "Kitapla Hayal Etmek" isimli eserinde bu konuyu gündemine alarak çeşitli tekniklerle bir nesnenin zihinde nasıl canlandırılabileceğini izaha çalışır. Üç bölümden oluşan eserde ilk bölüm; "Resim Oluşturma", ikinci bölüm; "Resimleri Hareket Ettirmek", üçüncü bölüm de; "Yeniden Resmetmek" üzerinedir. Scarry'nin yöntemleri ışığında Ahmet Ümit'in Bab-ı Esrar isimli romanı incelendiğinde yazarın imge oluşturma kabiliyeti daha iyi anlaşılacaktır. Abstract One of the difficulties that the author suffers when creating a text is the difficulty of creating the fictional world in the text in the mind of the reader. Even when a well-known place described in the said place, gets a new still filtered through the author's imagination. Therefore,

See video abstract on YouTube https://youtu.be/3XU8rxR1BPI
If you cite this, please use OnlineFirst version https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1357034X19834631

A recent widely reported study found that some participants would prefer to self- administer a small electric shock than be bored. This flawed study serves as a departure point to diagram pain and sensation beyond the boundaries of the individual body, consisting of four sections. First, in terms of laboratory-based experimentation and auto-experimentation with pain, there is a long history of viewing pain and touch through introspective means. Second, later theories of pain successively widened the scope of the physiological mechanisms and external influences on the organism, such as Melzack and Wall’s cybernetics-influenced gate control theory. Third, we briefly consider the nervous system as a homeostatic system, which finds an historical parallel in explanations of the milieu inte ́rieur of the organism, via Claude Bernard and Kurt Goldstein. Fourth, pain helps tip the organism as a whole from perception to action, but also operates beyond the organism as a biopsychosocial phenomenon.

Roland Barthes (1989) diz que o biografema está para a biografia como a fotografia está para a história. É uma forma de utilizar o factual da vida do outro, revisitando e refabulando, para estabelecer uma nova ordem (ou olhar) para o que se sabe sobre o biografado (BARTZ, 2014, p. 118), imprimindo novos significados ao texto. No entanto, como revisitar e refabular a dor física? Elaine Scarry (1985) diz que “sentir dor é ter certeza; ouvir sobre a dor do outro é ter dúvida” (p. 7). Uma biografia repleta de dor, como a da pintora mexicana Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), torna-se, portanto, imbiografemável. Este trabalho parte do relato do acidente de ônibus que Frida sofreu aos 18 anos, em quatro biografias romanceadas sobre ela, buscando identificar e compreender os artifícios escolhidos pelos autores para fugir da intraduzibilidade desse fato tão íntimo, que não só resiste à linguagem, como a destrói (SCARRY, 1989, p. 4).

Palavras-chave: Frida Kahlo; biografia; jornalismo literário; biografema; dor.

This article calls into question two core suppositions of ‘‘The Body in Pain’’:that pain is sheerly aversive; and that those who inflict pain do so unawares. I argue thatthese pieties avoid disturbing questions regarding the pain-filled body. The controlledexperience of pain is central to any number of practices; many of them place the bodyin extremis. Conversely, there are practices of pain-infliction undertaken with theexpectation of gratification or social validation. Pain, in short, is alluring as well as aversive. (Read-only version of paper available at the URL link above - http://rdcu.be/ks8y).

What if popular discourses of recognition and identity tend to rely, in whole or in part, on underlying conceptions of reproduction ~ specifically, the desire to reproduce one's own self-consciousness in the beliefs and behaviors of others? I argue for the importance of diagnosing a recognition/reproduction paradigm in which foreground discourses of recognition obfiiscate an underlying evangelical desire for reproduction of one's own self-image. To do so, I revisit G.W.F. Hegel's allegory of the lord^ondsman (master/slave), arguably the decisive source of modem and contemporary conceptions of recognition. I show that scholars t3^ically mislabel and misunderstand the logic behind Hegel's descriptions of recognition, and I then argue that what theorists typically interpret as recognition we should instead interpret as a paradigm of recognition co-valent with reproduction. More relevant to contemporary activists and scholars, I then illustrate how the desire for reproduction likely remains the dominant, normative paradigm in problematic forms of liberal identity politics and international relations in an era of neoliberal globalization. As a hermeneutical intervention, treating the desire for recognition as co-valent with a desire reproduction may help to distinguish hegemonic uses of identity fi-om liberatory, perhaps even dignifying, forms of mutualism and regard.

If solidarity differs according to the specific concerns that historically oppressed groups face, then some versions of solidarity may offer better resources than others for organizing liberatory movements to end cultural and institutional forms of oppression. Whereas solidarity simpatico to terms of moral and political theories can provide some forms of limited respite from oppression, and may even afford shares of cultural and political rule for some, such forms of solidarity may not foster liberatory emancipation from the long-term status quo that sustains cultural and institutional cruelties overall. Even while grassroots political movements may aim for expanded access to institutional claims and for equality and cultural representation, liberatory movements also have more specific objectives: to challenge the legitimacy of political and moral regimes, and to put those regimes in the obediential service of the vulnerable and oppressed. As I argue, to organize movements around these sorts of objectives will likely require what moral and political solidarity cannot afford. To that end, I propose a notion of liberatory solidarity as relational that differs substantively from other forms because it derives from a concept of relations as making one another.

In her meditation, On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry suggests that aesthetic encounters are inseparable from ethical concerns.' The errors that beauty exposes, the desire to replicate that it sets in motion, and the schemas it opens through "perceptual acuity"-she argues that all serve as primers for enacting justice.I
In transposing Scarry's text into theological aesthetics, then, we cannot neglect the concerns of human suffering. Therefore, this paper will pursue her observations through Biblical poetry-the texts hung taut between theophany (beholding God) and theodicy (holding God in contempt).
First, I will expose the "error of beauty" inherent in the ethical symmetry of retributive justice. Second, with the insights of liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez's On Job, and lain Matthews' Soundings from St. John of the Cross, I will suggest God's sublimity as the asymmetry that exposes this error.! From the asymmetrical site of sublime theophany, I will then re-enter Scarry's text as an apologia of love. This will require reading against Scarry's concept of ethical symmetry, focusing instead on her own asymmetrical sites of beauty: the object, the event and the replication. I will conclude by sketching love's aesthetic as asymmetrical beauty, exemplified in two theo-poetic sites: the Creator's incarnation and the created's sacramentality.

Call for Papers Montreal Architectural Review (Volume 6, 2019)
Special Issue: “Thinking Architecture”
Guest Editor: Dr. Lisa Landrum
Closing Date: September 1st, 2019 (now closed)

Thinking Architecture

In Thinking in an Emergency (2011), Elaine Scarry exposes a fallacy: that in emergency situations thinking must cease for quick action to prevail. She returns to this false opposition of thinking and acting in the closing chapter of Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom (2016). While the thrust of her argument is that weapons of mass destruction are fundamentally incompatible with democracy, her underlying premise – that thinking does not oppose action but orients action – is significant for the democratic art of architecture. Deliberative thinking enables action in the right direction. This capacity for deliberation, which Aristotle called bouleusis and aligned with phronēsis (prudence or practical wisdom), is essential for good decision-making, where the goal is not simply to act, but to act well in the midst of particular complex situations.

Scarry’s call for thinking resonates with Hannah Arendt’s insights on action and the faculty of judgment, as sketched in The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind; and as elucidated by Jacques Taminiaux in The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker (1997). At a time when architects are advocating for more immediate and impactful agency in view of global crises, and calling for less talk/more action, it is timely to patiently reflect on the agencies of careful and imaginative architectural thinking, and to recover thoughtful speech as a form of architectural action.

This Call for Thinking, for the sixth volume of the Montreal Architectural Review, invites papers exploring crucial manifestations, modalities and milieus of architectural thinking.

Contributions may probe any combination of the following themes, considered through analysis of specific discursive practices and/or built works from around the world and across time:

• the inherently embodied, situated, social and material modes of architectural thinking;

• ensemble thinking, or thinking in concert (and in tension) with plural agents in dramatic situations;

• places for thinking, which, as Marco Frascari argued, enable quests for wonder, truth, justice, happiness and a beautiful life;

• philosophical models for architectural thinking, such as interpretations of what Aristotle called in Nicomachean Ethics “architectonic phronēsis” [see MAR, vol. 2 (2015) > http://mar.mcgill.ca/article/view/17 ]; and

• habits of thinking fostered via architectural education. Alberto Pérez-Gómez has argued that the architectural education should focus not on solutions, but on “tactics for thought” nurtured through creative dialogue and critical debate. What are the best pedagogical strategies to cultivate these tactics for thought, so as to best prepare future architects to think and act well – even in an emergency?

We hereby invite submissions related to the history and philosophy of architecture on the above theme in one of three formats: scholarly essays (5,000 – 7,500 words, including endnotes); book reviews (1,000 – 1,500 words); or discursive experiments in deliberative or poetic dialogue (1,000 – 1,500 words). Each submission should be accompanied by a 100-word biography, and, in the case of an essay submission, an abstract of not more than 300 words.

The Montreal Architectural Review welcomes illustrated submissions but stresses the responsibility of the author in both providing the images and securing permissions to reproduce them. Please read the Review’s Copyright Notice before making a submission.

Submissions must be made through the Montreal Architectural Review website:
http://mar.mcgill.ca/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions - where you will be asked to register and to complete the online submission process. A guide to the online submission process is available on our website. All submissions must be in English and adhere to the Montreal Architectural Review Author Guidelines, also available on our website. You will be asked to follow a Preparation Checklist before making a submission.

Any queries should be made through the Montreal Architectural Review website.

One of the best known and most widely accepted premises regarding the experience of pain and suffering is its singular, private nature. Pain’s violence isolates us from everything else, embedding us completely within our own suffering so that there is nothing else but pain: no world or objects, no relationship with other people, no past or anticipation of the future. An utter withdrawal. But pain’s isolating force is dual: it affects not only those who suffer, but also those who are not in pain. Thus, it is precisely in pain – the exemplary state in which we need others with us to offer their help and sympathy – that we find ourselves in solitude; and it is precisely in the state of pain that we leave others to suffer alone. 

This essay takes the use of yellow in Yellow Submarine as illustrative of three intertwining themes: animation practices taking-up of bolder, flatter, modernist uses of color after World War II; the tendency of yellow to register on the eye as closer and sharper than cool colors (such as blue); and the inexpressibility of pain sensations. It is suggested that in roughly the same way that the flexibility of cartoon figures may express fantasies about overcoming the limits of our bodies, the extremely close relation between cartoon figures and their colors may express fantasies about our internal states, such sensations of pain and color.

A investigação dos registros íntimos, já carregada de sentidos múltiplos, torna-se ainda mais rica quando se depara com relatos das dores de seus autores. Seja física seja emocional, a dor carrega consigo um caráter indizível e, conforme lembra a pesquisadora estadunidense da dor Elaine Scarry (1987), de destruição da linguagem. A tradução da dor no papel realiza-se por meio de palavras ou imagens, que são insuficientes, mas buscam aproximar-se ao máximo do sentimento original, mas deixam para trás uma carga afetiva ilegível. Entendendo a limitação de toda linguagem, não só no que tange à dor, e compreendendo o ilegível como algo que complementa a compreensão do texto, como lembra Jacques Derrida (1986), este trabalho pretende analisar brevemente dois diários, a saber, o do crítico Roland Barthes (1915-1980) e o da pintora mexicana Frida Kahlo (1907- 1954), ambos lidam, respectivamente, com o luto da perda da mãe e as dores crônicas de todo uma vida.