Pain and Culture. A phenomenological approach to the relation between pain and creativity

Abstract

This paper develops a phenomenological study of cultural creativity, which places the phenomenon of pain in the centre. The following paper is a commentary of the book by Elaine Scarry The Body in Pain, an impressive work of phenomenological analysis of pain and its role in the making of the material culture. Although this work is outside the phenomenological tradition, which the author apparently does not know, the rigor and depth of the analysis allow the phenomena to appear sharply and to speak by themselves. This, together with her original conception of the artificial world as if it were animate, which is a legitimacy of the technical world and of humanism, justifies taking this book seriously as a referent both for contemporary philosophy and cultural theory,

and deserves, therefore, a commentary. This article finishes with an application of this theory of pain and creativity to the concrete case of architecture and its capacity to build the material world in which we dwell.

Keywords: pain, imagination, body, mimesis, animism, history of architecture, architecture of pleasure, Elaine Scarry.