The art of useless suffering

Scientific Contribution

The art of useless suffering

Andrew EdgarDepartment of Philosophy, Cardiff University, Humanities Building, Colum Drive, Cardiff, CF10 3EU, UK (Phone: +44-29-20874935; Fax: +44-292087618; E-mail: [email protected])

Abstract. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role that modernism in the arts might have inarticulating the uselessness and incomprehensibility of physical and mental suffering. It is argued that theexperience of illness is frequently resistant to interpretation, and as such, it will be suggested, toconventional forms of artistic expression and communication. Conventional narratives, and otherbeautiful or conventionally expressive aesthetic structures, that presuppose the possibility and desirabilityof an harmonious and meaningful resolution to conflicts and tensions, may fundamentally misrepresentthe patient�s experience. By drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas (on useless suffering) and theaesthetic theories of Nietzsche and T. W. Adorno, it will be argued first that a faith in the possibility ofharmonious resolution of suffering is misplaced and does violence to the experience of suffering. Second, itwill be argued that the expression of suffering lies not in finding words, images or sounds thatcommunicate the experience of that suffering to others, but rather in the persistent and radical disruptionof any illusion of meaning and coherence that might be imposed upon the experience, so that the verypossibility of communication is also disrupted.

Key words: Adorno, Auschwitz, Barbaric Poetry, Frank, Levinas, modernism

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to explore a particularfacet in the role of the arts as an expression ofhuman suffering. It will be assumed that much ofthe most significant and characteristic art of thetwentieth century – and thus art that we mightbroadly construe as modernist – has been con-cerned to give voice to the experiences of those whosuffer.1 Crucially, it will be argued that such art isdistinctive, not in its subject matter – which is tosay, the suffering it seeks to represent2 – but ratherin what might be called the language3 that this artdevelops. Modern art does not merely representsuffering, but rather encourages reflection upon thenature of art and the representational, expressiveand formal potentials embedded within artisticmedia. Modern art is highly self-conscious of itsrelationship to its subject-matter, and thus of themanner in which that subject-matter can be con-strued and distorted in the process of artisticrepresentation. While it is accepted that modern artthereby engendered a vast range of new expressiveand organisational techniques, it will also be

suggested that much modern art has been con-cerned with the experiences of victims of politicaloppression, or perhaps more precisely, that manyof the more significant interpreters of modern art(and here I have in mind Adorno) have focusedupon overtly political works, or have givenmodernist works socio-political interpretations. Itwill be the contention of this paper that theexpressive resources developed within modernism,and that have been interpreted in terms of politicaland social suffering, can be appropriated for thearticulation and communication of the experienceof what might be termed medical suffering, which isto say, suffering grounded in physical and psychi-atric disease and disability.

The argument will be pursued in three stages.First, an account of extreme suffering will bedeveloped from the work of Emmanuel Levinas,and will be complemented by the sociologistArthur W. Frank�s reflections on the problems ofnarrating the experience of suffering. Second, anaccount of modern art will be developed fromNietzsche�s speculation on the tension between theApolline and the Dionysian in ancient Greek

Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy (2007) 10:395–405 � Springer 2007

DOI 10.1007/s11019-007-9082-2

tragedy, and from T. W. Adorno�s overtly socio-political defence of modernist art. The contentionthat the aesthetic of modernism offers a responseto the challenge posed by Levinas�s account ofuseless suffering will be illustrated throughAdorno�s reading of Beckett�s Endgame. Finally,the potential that an understanding of modernistart might have for therapy will be sketched.

Useless suffering

At the core of Levinas�s philosophy lies therelationship between the self and the Other, wherethe Other is understood as another particularperson (and no mere thing or existent, or evenabstraction), and where the self must recognise andrespond to the fact that this relationship is one ofnon-identity. That is to say that the self should notdominate or subsume the Other, as it mightlegitimately dominate and manipulate a merething. Thus, on Levinas�s account, it is a mistaketo think of oneself as an autonomous being, withabsolute freedom of disposition over the Other,for, first, the self is not prior to the Other, butbecomes aware of itself through its relationship tothe Other. As Levinas expresses this, the self has a�metaphysical desire� for the Other. This �meta-physical desire� is distinguished from the desires ofthe appetite that might, for example, be satisfiedthrough the consumption of food or the enjoymentof exercise. Metaphysical desire does not seeksatisfaction, for again the Other cannot be incor-porated into the self as an object that is dominatedand consumed. The desired, Levinas tells us, �doesnot fulfil [metaphysical desire], but deepens it�(Levinas, 1998: 34) Thus, second, it is only inrecognising its relationship to the Other that theself properly comes to understand itself as anethical and social being. Crucially, it recognisesthat its freedom is radically checked by the ethicaldemands that the Other places upon it. Therelationship is akin to one of welcoming a stranger.Ethics is thus, for Levinas, the foundation of allphilosophy (Levinas, 1989).

Levinas�s short essay �Useless Suffering� may beseen to explore the relationship of self to Otherthrough the experience of pain. Levinas, however,begins with the encounter with our own pain. Theexamples of pain include �certain cases of persistentor obstinate pain, the neuralgias and the intoler-able lumbagos resulting from lesions of the periph-eral nerves, and the tortures which are experiencedby certain patients stricken with malignant

tumours� (Levinas, 1988: 158). These are, it maybe noted, examples of what we have previouslyreferred to as medical suffering. Levinas articulatesthis pain within a broadly Kantian perspective.Superficially considered, such pain is something weexperience, and as such, in Kantian terms, is partof the heterogeneous manifold perceptions, �likethe lived experience of colour, of sound, of contact,or like any sensation� (156). Yet the whole point ofsuch extreme suffering is that pain is unlike anyother sensation. According to the Kantian modelof the mind, the faculties of imagination andunderstanding work to unify these heterogeneousperceptions, thereby constituting a solid, stable andpredictable (phenomenal) world within which wecan act as autonomous beings. Pain does not allowitself to be assimilated. It is, Levinas suggests,�unassumable and ‘‘unassumability’’� (156), whichis to say that it is at once a particular experiencethat cannot be assimilated into the unity of thephenomenal world, and also that which under-mines the very possibility of unifying the rest of themanifold. Pain cuts across the Kantian structure ofthe mind; from being a mere experience it becomesthe way in which we experience everything else.Pain short circuits, as it were, the workings of thefaculties.

Levinas thus gives pain a deliberately paradox-ical position within the Kantian system. It is notsimply an experience, but is rather a modality ofexperience (and as such is placed alongside thetraditional Kantian modal categories of possibility,existence and necessity (Kant, 1933: A80/B106)).The Kantian modalities determine the manner inwhich we experience something. Levinas�s claim isthat, if pain is treated as a modality, then it shapesthe manner in which all our other experiences areapprehended, but does so precisely by underminingthe possibility of coherent and meaningful experi-ence (Levinas, 1988: 156). Unlike all other experi-ences, pain cannot be constituted as an experienceof an object, for it cannot be given the stability andcoherence of an object. It has, we might suggest, aradical contingency that inhibits any attempt toorder it and to give it a disciplined and non-disruptive place amongst our other experiences.

More radically still, pain undermines the sub-ject�s capacity to experience anything else as anobject. This it does by undermining the �I think� –which is to say, the unifying activity of the Kantiantranscendental subject. Pain undermines the sub-ject, radically incapacitating its activity and auton-omy.4 As Levinas expresses this, the sufferingsubject acquires a passivity that goes beyond the

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passivity of mere receptivity (which is to say,beyond the receptivity of the subject�s assimilationof the rest of the manifold sensations) (157). Theirony of pain is that, in inhibiting any possibility ofthe subject unifying its experience into an objectiveworld, it instead renders the subject into an object.The human is permitted �the identity of a thingonly in the passivity of the submission [before thepain]� (157). Again, ironically, pain underminesand perverts the Kantian category of negation. AsSartre argued, negation, and the capacity to seethat something is not the case, is the ground ofhuman freedom (Sartre, 1958: 7). For Levinas, thesubject�s refusal of pain, the blunt experience of thepain�s evil and the recognition that the pain shouldnot be, does not free the subject, but rather furtherensnares it, precisely because the reality of the paincannot be denied (Levinas, 1988: 157).

Levinas�s exploration of pain has further twists.Pain, as explained, inhibits the unification of themanifold. Pain is thus fundamentally withoutmeaning, and renders the rest of one�s life mean-ingless too. But, Levinas implies, the very attemptto give meaning to pain exacerbates the problem.Firstly, in the surviving remnants of the Kantiansubject, humans do not merely endure pain. Theyretain the resources to give it some residualmeaning. Pain is not merely pain as it might befor a non-human animal, but also a symptom ofcrippling, disfiguring or mortal illnesses; and weanticipate the pain enduring for months or years tocome. Pain is thus accompanied by �anxiety anddistress�, that �add to the cruelty of hurt� (Levinas,1988: 158). There is an apparent paradox here. Onthe one hand pain is meaningless, and yet on theother we strive to give meaning to pain, and thatmeaning exacerbates the suffering. The paradox isresolved by recognising the normativity in theclaims being made. The meaninglessness of suffer-ing is a fact. If one, from whatever intention,attempts to give meaning to pain, one worsens it,and does wrong. Yet, more profoundly, it may besuggested that the resources that the remnants ofthe Kantian subject has to bestow meaning are notthen to be suppressed (thereby leaving the suffererin a state of mere animality). Rather, the ethicalchallenge lies in finding a way to articulate themeaninglessness of the suffering that does not addto its cruelty.

There is for Levinas a profound immorality inany attempt to explain away or justify suffering,and thus to give suffering an inappropriate artic-ulation. While certain forms of suffering may havea use (and we might consider here the side effects of

chemotherapy, or even the pain and risk of injurythat an athlete imposes upon themselves in thecourse of training) the justification of uselesssuffering lies, for Levinas, at the core of allimmorality. It is precisely here that we mayrecognise that Levinas�s essay has turned fromthe question of the self�s encounter with its ownpain, to the core ethical issue of the relationship ofself to the Other. The encounter with the sufferingof the Other is the most fundamental form that therelationship of self to the Other can take, and assuch, poses most starkly the challenges that lie inall attempts to welcome the stranger. Nothing ismore strange, and more difficult to welcome, thanthe suffering of another.

Levinas may thus continue by asserting that,�[f]or an ethical sensibility the justification of theneighbour�s pain is certainly the source of allimmorality� (163). The justification of suffering,whether it be through metaphysical theodicies, thatappeal for example to the need to redeem the sinsof ancestors, the concept of original sin, or to theobscure purposes of God, and political justifica-tions of the exercise of state power and the �rationaladministration of pain� (160), are alike in attribut-ing a purpose to suffering. Consistent with Kantianethics, Levinas condemns theodicy for transform-ing the suffering of one person into a means for therealisation of the ends of another (Kant, 1983:428). In the context of the political history of thetwentieth century – and here the essay has clearlyshifted from the question of medical suffering tosuffering engendered through political oppression –the disproportion between the degree of sufferingand any attempted theodicy becomes unavoidable(Levinas, 1988: 159–160).

The ethical challenge of useless suffering maythen be seen to lie in the problem of communication,or what in this essay Levinas calls the �inter-humanorder� (Levinas, 1988: 164). The sufferer is isolatedin their suffering, precisely because the sufferingcannot be given meaning, either by the sufferer him-or herself or by their neighbour. On the one hand,Levinas is arguing that suffering cannot, ethically,be given meaning by being classified and con-strained within a social contract that defines therights and duties of citizens (165). On the otherhand, suffering appears to undermine our ability towelcome the stranger, precisely because his or herpain is so strange as not to be open to assimilationwithin the commonly shared meanings of a publiclanguage.

For Levinas, if suffering has a meaning, then itis not a meaning for the sufferer, but rather for the

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one who witnesses that suffering. The only mean-ing that suffering can acquire is as �suffering for thesuffering… of someone else� (Levinas, 1988: 159).It is in the encounter with the suffering of the Otherthat metaphysical desire is met, and the selfdeepened (but crucially, never fulfilled, for fulfil-ment would, once more, entail imposing meaningon the suffering, assimilating it as does anytheodicy). There is then a moral obligation toengage with the suffering, however demanding thatengagement might be, or as Levinas puts it,whatever demands it places on the �resources ofthe self� (Levinas, 1988: 164 – original italics).Attending to the sufferer launches us on an�adventure of suffering� (159) and an �adventureof subjectivity� (163), which is to say that, byattending to the sufferer without explaining awayor giving illusory meaning to that suffering, onerecognises the challenge that suffering poses toone�s sense of self, the vulnerability of that self, andsense of belonging within a community that isconstitutive of the self.

Levinas�s account of useless suffering poses twochallenges for art (and thus for the concerns of thecurrent paper). One may ask, first, whether art canallow the sufferer to respond to the disruption oftheir Kantian self, and secondly, whether art offersresources through which the breakdown of com-munication between the sufferer and others may behealed or by passed. Put otherwise, this is to ask ifart can help to restore the subjectivity of thesufferer, and to return the sufferer to a languagecommunity.

Chaos narratives

Narrative theory has, over the last three decades,made significant contributions to the philosophyand sociology of medicine, and to medical practiceitself.5 Narrative theory may provide a bridge fromLevinas�s account of suffering to an understandingof art�s response to suffering, precisely in so far asnarrative theory focuses upon an artistic resource,that of storytelling.

Arthur W. Frank�s account of the �woundedstoryteller� may be shown to be of particularimportance here, not least because he explicitlydraws on Levinas�s notion of �useless suffering�(1995: 176ff). Frank works within the frameworkof sociological inquiry into illness as biographicaldisruption (Williams, 2003: 95–111; Bury, 1982),which is to say a tradition that treats the self as anarrative achievement, and that recognises that the

experience of illness threatens, temporarily orpermanently, the possibility of telling a continuousstory of the self�s development, as would becharacteristic of the healthy self.

While illness may disrupt the story throughwhich the subject constitutes itself, narrativeresources are also drawn upon to repair thatdisruption. Frank suggests that this occurs typi-cally through what he calls �restitution narratives�,and crucially that this is the narrative formfavoured by the medical establishment itself(Frank, 1995: 80). Illness is here treated as anacute phenomenon, and thus as a mere hiatus inthe sufferer�s narrative. The sufferer falls ill, sub-mits him- or herself to the attentions of the medicalprofessions (and thereby adopts something akin toParsons�s sick role), before recovering. Frank�scritical point is that while this is the dominant formwithin which the experience of illness is narrated incontemporary society, it is also an increasinglyinappropriate form, for it fails to take account of,and more insidiously falsifies, the experience ofchronic illness. The sufferer of chronic illness ordisability, or indeed the person who is in remission,cannot expect to be restored to health. Therestitution narrative thereby becomes oppressive,precisely in so far as it places unrealisable expec-tations upon the sufferer, and denies them thenarrative resources necessary to make new sense oftheir lives as a chronically ill person. Franktherefore defends the importance of what he terms�quest narratives� through which the sufferer strivesto come to terms with their condition, and thus tofind a new way of narrating their lives (Frank,1995: 115–136).

While the tension between restitution and questnarratives is important, of more relevance to ourcurrent concerns is a third category offered byFrank, that of the �chaos narrative�. The experienceof chaos may be closely related to that of uselesssuffering. The sufferer is overwhelmed by events,so that the promise of restitution and recoverycomes to seem impossible. It is an experience of�life never getting better�, revealing in the suffereronly �vulnerability, futility, and impotence� (Frank,1995: 97). This condition is so extreme that the veryterm �chaos narrative� is, Frank implies, a misnomer.Chaos allows only an �anti-narrative of time withoutsequence, telling without mediation, and speakingabout oneself without being fully able to reflect ononeself� (98 – original italics). That is to say that,even in recounting the experience of chaos, thesufferer offers at best what might be seen as a merechronicle, detailing a succession of blows. The only

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structure that such a chronicle has is that of oneevent following another: �and then and then andthen� (99).

Frank�s �chaos� sheds light on Levinas�s �uselesssuffering� firstly by working through, in terms ofbiographical narrative, the disruption of theKantian self. For Frank chaos as anti-narrative isa �non-self story� (178). The subjectivity that couldunify and articulate the experiences, and that couldthus make sense of them and tell a story, isundermined by the chaos. Chaos, like Levinas�s�unassumable and ‘‘unassumability’’�, does notallow space for a subject that can be distancedfrom the experience and thus reflect upon it. Chaosis lived, not told (98), and the chronicle of eventsoffered by the sufferer is little more than asymptom of their suffering, not part of thetherapeutic engagement (as restitution and questnarratives might be).

Chaos isolates the sufferer, as Levinas arguesthat useless suffering separates the sufferer fromcommunication. Ordinary language and theresources of story telling are inadequate to thearticulation and communication of chaos. �Chaosis what can never be told; it is the hole in the telling�(101–102). Further, Frank suggests that the chron-icle of suffering is threatening and indeed repellentto healthy listeners (98), thereby echoing Levinas�srecognition of the difficulty of welcoming thesuffering stranger. It is almost too tempting forthe listener to mitigate the chronicle by findinghope within it. One finds, for example, in stories ofHolocaust survivors examples of human resilience(101), but such moments of hope and meaningfalsify the actual encounter with chaos anduselessness.6 Here is Levinas�s criticism of theodicy.The inappropriate telling of the story of sufferingjustifies it, and that is wrong precisely because itencourages the listener to forget that suffering isuseless to the sufferer.

Frank glosses Levinas�s concern with the inter-human: �The Other who suffers now speaks butcannot hear his own speech, because to be able tohear oneself is already to have found some mean-ing in useless suffering. But this speech that cannothear itself remains a call for aid� (Frank, 1995:180). In the context of the current inquiry, this is torepeat and to refine the challenge to art: can artgive voice to the one who suffers uselessly withoutfalsifying and imposing spurious meaning on thatsuffering? Frank�s account of chaos suggests thatart must find a space between that which lived andthat which is told. That is to say, that the suffererscannot be left in the meaningless isolation of their

lives; nor can meaning be given to them, throughthe telling of a conventional story. The challenge is,then, to find in modern art the resources for suchappropriately unconventional storytelling.

Suffering and art

Nietzsche�s early essay on Greek drama, The Birthof Tragedy, offers a rich resource for exploring therelationship of art to suffering, and a brief reviewof its arguments will provide a stepping-off pointinto Adorno�s account of modern art. At the coreof The Birth of Tragedy lies Nietzsche�s interpre-tation of Greek culture as being grounded in therecognition of �the fears and horrors of existence�(Nietzsche, 1993: 22). This existence is summarisedin the story of Silenus. King Midas, wishing toknow what was most desirable for humanity,captures the faun Silenus, and forces him to speak:�Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard andhardship, why do you force me to say what itwould be much more fruitful for you not to hear?The best of all things is something entirely outsideyour grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.But the second-best thing for you – is to die soon�(22–original italics).7 Art allows the Greeks tosurvive in the face of such knowledge. Nietzscheanalyses this art in terms of its two conflictingpoles, the Dionysian and the Apolline.

Silenus� truth is encapsulated in the Dionysian.Dionysus is the god of intoxication, and thus on theone hand represents the ecstatic and excessive, thejoy of song and dance. On the other hand, Dionysusrepresents a threat to civilised humanity. It is the�eternal suffering and contradiction� of life (25), thatundermines what Nietzsche here presents as theillusion of individuality (following Schopenhauer onthe principium individuationis) (16). The followers ofDionysus are reduced to a mass. The implication isthat themodern spectator of theDionysianwouldbesent mad by the experience, or put otherwise and inLevinas�s terms, the unifyingKantian subject wouldbe destroyed by the encounter with the Dionysian.The Greek therefore experiences the Dionysianthrough the illusion of order that is provided byApollo. Apollo is the god of rational form, of lyricpoetry and the plastic arts. Within the art work, theApolline is therefore the formal moment, but alsothe moment that allows reflection upon the horrorsand dangers of the Dionysian. Form construes andto a degree fictionalises those horrors, but therebypreserves the spectator�s distance from them. Ingreat art, and here Nietzsche seeks to defend the


theatre of Aeschylus and Sophocles (45–51), theApolline moment of reflection and order makes theDionysian palatable, yet the Dionysian in turnrenders the Apolline problematic. The order isdisrupted, and the Dionysian is experiencedprecisely through this disruption.

While Nietzsche defends certain aspects ofGreek culture, his thesis is also a critical one,challenging what he sees as the decline of Greekculture with the drama of Euripides and thephilosophy of Socrates (71). It is precisely thiscritical thesis that is relevant to our currentconcern. Greek culture, and as a consequenceWestern culture in general, comes for Nietzsche tobe dominated by the Apolline. Euripidean dramasare rationally planned, in contrast to what Nietz-sche sees as the unconscious creativity of Aeschylus(63). But more importantly, they begin to deny thevery existence of the Dionysian. Western philoso-phy and science, from Socrates onwards, are seenby Nietzsche not merely to emphasise the impor-tance of rational examination and control of theirsubject-matter, but more radically to deny theexistence of anything that is not amenable to suchexamination and control (73). Our purpose here isnot to examine the veracity of Nietzsche�s argu-ment, but rather to recognise the resonance thatthe polarity of Apolline and Dionysian has withany concern with the narration and representationof suffering. If the Dionysian can be treated as ametaphor for Levinas�s useless suffering andFrank�s chaos, then a purely Apolline approachto such suffering, because it imposes a rationalorder and thus meaning, would falsify it.8 It is thisthat Frank recognises in noting that chaos is lived,not told. The Apolline is thus the moment oftheodicy in storytelling, and the imposition of arestitution narrative upon the chronically ill isprecisely such a falsification and justification ofsuffering. But here Nietzsche offers the first hintof a solution to the paradox of how to form an artof suffering that does not falsify the suffering, bysuggesting that, in the tragedies of Aeschylus andSophocles, there lies an art that is aware of itsfalsification of the Dionysian experience of suffer-ing, and that allows the Dionysian to be experi-enced precisely where the Apolline striving fororder breaks down.

Barbaric poetry

The German social philosopher and musicologistT. W. Adorno takes up the problem of the

relationship of art to suffering, not least in termsof the question of art�s response to the Holocaust.In this context, the idea that there is no poetry afterAuschwitz is famously attributed to him. What heactually wrote (in 1949) was: �Cultural criticismfinds itself faced with the final stage of the dialecticof culture and barbarism. To write poetry afterAuschwitz is barbaric� (Adorno, 1981: 34). Theapparent condemnation of post-Auschwitz poetry(and �poetry� may be read as standing for all thearts), and specifically its condemnation as barbaric,has been widely interpreted (and probably misin-terpreted) (see Hofmann, 2005). It may be sug-gested that Adorno was not arguing that poetryshould not be written after Auschwitz. Such aclaim would lie uneasily with other comments, suchas his remark that art is akin to the right of thetorture victim to scream (Adorno, 1973: 362).Rather, the term �barbaric� must be given a specialweight, and that this weight is pointed to by thepreceding reference to the dialectic of culture andbarbarism. Crucially Adorno is proposing adialectic and not a simple opposition, and that isto say that the barbaric is not to be condemned outof hand.

Adorno, along with Max Horkheimer, is theauthor of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the centralidea of which is that Western Enlightenment, thatcharacterised itself as the overcoming of myth andsuperstition, has reverted into a new form of myth,and not least in so far as it has become incapable ofmoral self-reflection (Horkheimer and Adorno,2002: 63–93). This mythologisation of the Enlight-enment contributes directly to the horrors ofAuschwitz itself, where humanity can be reducedto an object of domination and manipulation, andwhere its administrators and executors were seem-ingly blind to the reality and moral imperative ofthe suffering of, in Levinas�s terms, the Other. Inthe light of such a condemnation of enlightenedculture, to write �civilised� poetry may indeedbe barbaric. A �civilised� poetry written afterAuschwitz would share with the Enlightenment afailure to reflect upon itself and upon its moralconsequences, precisely because it would lack alanguage adequate to the experience of the post-Auschwitz world. It would lack this language inlarge part because of assumptions that it makesabout the ordered and coherent form that an artwork should take, and the nature of the artist (orindeed the narrator and characters within thework) as unified, autonomous Kantian subjects.

In Nietzschean terms, this is a consequence ofan Apolline culture that treats everything as open

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to rational manipulation, and that denies theexistence of anything that cannot be rationallyknown. Nothing can be allowed to disrupt theprincipium individuationis. As Adorno himselfexpresses this, while rational knowledge can sub-sume suffering under concepts and so amelioratesuffering, �knowledge can scarcely express itthrough its own means of experience without itselfbecoming irrational� (Adorno, 1997: 24). In thelight of Levinas�s comments, it may be suggestedthat Apolline civilisation allows the reader toignore the limitations of the Kantian subject inthe face of suffering, precisely because the Other isreduced to something amenable to instrumentalmanipulation. Even if the intentions of the manip-ulator are honourable (as in the case of techno-logical medical interventions, grounded innarratives of restitution), as Adorno suggests, theexperience of suffering is excluded, and so thesubject is inhibited from entering Levinas�s realmof the inter-human.

Exactly what such barbaric poetry mightamount to can be illustrated through Adorno�sreading of Samuel Beckett�s play Endgame (Adorno,1991). Adorno presents Endgame as a work of artthat engages with the problem of suffering, butspecifically in terms of the meaninglessness ofcontemporary existence. The reading is a socialone, that situates Beckett within the condition oflate capitalism, and as such within a society thathas been drained of meaning through the impact ofinstrumental rationality in both technology andsocial administration (see Adorno, 2003). Beckettmay thus be seen to respond to an extremeApolline culture. The response is, however, notan attempt to restore meaning to society, or evenan attempt to label and thereby give form to theabsence of meaning (which Adorno finds in suchexistential categories as �absurdity� and �thrown-ness�), but rather an articulation of the veryabsence of meaning. As Adorno presents this,�meaning, according to [Beckett], is meaningless-ness� (251), or again, �[m]eaning nothing becomesthe only meaning� (261). This is achieved, not byreducing the drama to the random or chaotic, butrather through a rigorous disruption and parody-ing of the conventions of dramatic form. �Exposi-tion, complication, plot, perietia and catastrophereturn in decomposed form as participants in anexamination of the dramaturgical corpse� (260).The play is an �organised meaninglessness� (242), atonce carefully structured, akin Adorno suggests toa fugue (269) or the working out of the conven-tional moves of a chess endgame. Ultimately, the

conclusion of the play remains ambiguous, for �toomuch certainty about this would provide too muchmeaning� (270). It is nonetheless in the details ofthe play, in speeches, stage directions, and the veryprecision of its language, that this meaninglessnessis organised. As narratives peter out, jokes fall flatand orders are contradicted or abandoned, the verynotion of character and agency becomes problem-atic. The characters are starved of invention andinspiration, and indeed become fearful of meaningsomething (261). Thus all possibility of decisiveintentional agency is eroded. The play�s language isone that has become divorced from definite signi-fication. The Apolline precision with which Beckettuses the language merely serves to expose itsDionysian arbitrariness, so that �language effectsa healing disease in the sick person� (262), which isto say, makes the naive speaker aware of the verynonsense and ineffectiveness of the language theyspeak.

If Endgame is barbaric poetry, it is so because itchallenges the subject�s conviction as to its unity,and thereby makes explicit what Frank calls �thehole in the telling� (Frank, 1995: 102). This is notsimply the fact that the characters within thedrama fail to achieve Kantian autonomy. It israther that even the spectators must confront theirown failure to understand the text.9 Adornoexplores this by reflecting upon the way in whichart necessarily shapes its content. A well formedwork does violence to its content, he suggests,precisely in so far as it allows nothing to escape ordisrupt that form. In contrast, the barbaric workwill allow itself to be disrupted by that content(Adorno, 1997: 65), just as the Dionysian disruptedthe Apolline order of the Aeschylean drama. Theparallel to Levinas�s Kantian subject is clear. Theform of the traditionally cultured art work unifiesthe work�s materials and subject-matter. It thusexpresses the unifying work of the Kantian subject.The key to the barbaric work is that it explicitlyacknowledges the failure of that process of unifi-cation in the face of the suffering.10

In commenting that, �[t]he rank of an artwork isdefined essentially by whether it exposes itself to,or withdraws from, the irreconcilable� (Adorno,1997: 249), Adorno presents the tension betweenthe formal moments of an art work and its subject-matter as crucial to the assessment of its success.The traditional and cultivated work offers itsaudience the illusion of coherence and meaning.The barbaric or modern work disabuses its audi-ence of this illusion. This may be understood as ashift in the nature of art, from an overt concern


with its content or subject-matter to an overtconcern with form, and thus with the process bywhich that subject-matter is shaped. Indeed, Ad-orno argues that the expressive power of a workcomes from its disruption of taken for grantedassumptions about how art should be formed, andthus the disruption of its illusions of beauty,mimetic representation and meaning. The audienceis made aware of the fact that the art work is anartefact. Any art work is the product of the artist�sattempt to construe its subject-matter. It is anartefact striving to be adequate to a non-artefac-tual reality. The barbaric work draws the audi-ence�s attention to the struggle with theheterogeneous subject matter that the work recordsand represents (Adorno, 1997: 407). Tensionsremain unresolved, and in terms of the traditionallanguage of art, the barbaric work may remainmeaningless, precisely because it renounces atraditional language through which suffering isreconciled within a well-told story or a well-formedimage. It thereby challenges our pre-conceptionabout representation, and indeed about the author-ship that accompanies such traditional representa-tional narratives.

The discipline and organisation that Adornofinds in Beckett, and thus in barbaric art in general,is grounded in the art work�s relationship to thesource of suffering. As Adorno expresses this, art�takes into itself the disaster, the principle ofrepression, rather than merely protesting hope-lessly against it� (Adorno, 1997: 24). That is to saythat the art work mimics or reproduces the verysources of suffering, albeit within its own medium.The reproduction cannot then be one that merelyallows the repression to continue unchecked, butrather, by playing it out in the alien medium of theart work, allows it to come to consciousness. OnAdorno�s reading, Beckett is thus sensitive to theadministrative violence of contemporary society,but crucially allows that violence to work itself outin the language and gestures of the drama. Thesuggestion of this paper is that, by shifting thefocus of the reading from political and socialsuffering to medical suffering, the resources thatBeckett and other barbaric or modernist artistsprovide can be recouped to allow an engagementwith the useless suffering of illness. In the case ofEndgame this is facilitated by the importance thatBeckett gives to the medical within the play.(Adorno notes the importance of �the minorparaphernalia of health� to Hamm (Adorno,1991: 269).) If the drama is, at one all-importantlevel, about the failure of language and agency,

then the characters within the drama may be reinter-preted, not as victims of late capitalism, but rather asvictims of a culture that inhibits communicationabout, and reflection upon, illness and suffering.11

Confronted by barbaric art, the spectatorbecomes aware that the Kantian work of unifica-tion cannot be pursued to completion. In the faceof the barbaric work, seriously engaged with, thesensitive judge of art must recognise that whichgoes beyond the art work, the real and �unassum-able� suffering that it points to, precisely by failingto encompass and justify it, and may begin torecognise exactly what it is in civilised, Apollinelanguage and culture that brings about that failure.It is in this moment of reflection on the nature ofart that the barbaric poet goes beyond a merechaos narrative. Crucially barbaric art re-opens thepossibility of the inter-human that Frank recog-nises has been lost in the anti-narrative of chaos(Frank, 1995: 98), because it forces one to reflectupon the very engagement of art and story tellingwith suffering.12 Barbaric poetry thereby seeks toconnect with and articulate (the unassumability of)suffering, without allowing itself to be reduced to amere symptom of suffering. The barbaric workexists in the space between the lived and the told.

Conclusion

Levinas�s account of useless suffering was seen topose two challenges to modern art: to respond tothe disruption of the Kantian self; and to respondto the isolation of the sufferer from the inter-human. The analysis of barbaric poetry suggeststhat modern art does not meet these challenges byrestoring the agency of the suffering self. Nor doesit bring suffering back in to the conventionallymeaningful language of civilised or Apolline cul-ture. There is no restoration, nor even a sign of theresilience of the human spirit. Such gestures wouldbe to falsify suffering, imposing meaning upon itand justifying it in the style of a theodicy. Yetbarbaric poetry is more than the anti-narrative ofchaos, for it articulates the disruption of the self,tracing that disruption to the failure of contempo-rary (medical and ethical) culture. The sufferer isnot thereby restored to communication with therest of the community, but that community issensitised to the exclusion of the sufferer, preciselythrough an awareness of the limits of ordinarylanguage and thought.

This still leaves open the question of who theintended audience of any art of useless suffering

ANDREW EDGAR402

might be. The suggestion is that modernismprovides a complex resource, through which nar-ratives and other forms of representation might beenriched. As such, it might arm those who maysuffer against that possible eventuality. One�snarrative resources will be rich enough to respondto useless suffering, precisely because one will haveresources that do not require the false impositionof meaning and coherence upon that experience. Itmay also facilitate communication with those whosuffer, offering a language to both therapist andpatient alike, opening up the possibility of givingmeaning to suffering, in Levinas�s terms, as oneunderstands what it is to suffer for others. Thedread of the chaos narrative is mitigated slightly, asbarbaric poetry allows some retention of the senseof self, albeit paradoxically in an understanding ofits limitations and failings. Yet an example sug-gests the importance of this barbaric modernism tothe sufferer, as an act of self-understanding. In aBBC radio documentary on the Soviet composerShostakovich, �Journey into Light�, the music criticStephen Johnson reflected, not simply on Shosta-kovich�s career and achievements as a composer,but more personally on the importance of much ofthat music to him (Johnson, 2006). Crucially, thisimportance lay in the role that the music played inhow Johnson dealt with his own periods of clinicaldepression. In its disruptive humour, sporadicviolence and abrupt mood changes, the ambiguityof Shostakovich�s works may be seen to trace thefragmentation of subject, and the collapse ofLevinas�s Kantian �I�, in the face of uselesssuffering. Shostakovich�s grimmer and moreuncompromising works (the 7th and 8th stringquartets and the late symphonies, for example)were at once what Johnson wanted to listen toduring periods of depression (so that he did notwant to be cheered up by music), and also whatallowed him to understand his condition. Not allpatients will react in this way, of course. However,an art that allows the patient to confront the realityof their condition, and thus eventually to tell astory that acknowledges their vulnerability andimpotence, may be a vital first step in recovery.13

Notes

1. Lists are invariably incomplete and idiosyncratic, per-haps unhelpfully so, but here consider works such asPicasso�s Guernica, much of the work of expression-

ists from Munch through to Bacon and even theabstract expressionism of Pollock; the neo-objectivism

of Dix; compositions such as Schoenberg�s Erwartung,and Survivor from Warsaw, Stravinsky�s Symphony inThree Movements; and Shostakovich�s string quartetcycle; and the poetry of Paul Celan and Anna

Akhmatova; through to the work of contemporaryartists such as Anselm Kiefer.

2. See Spivy (2001) on the history of the representationof suffering in (predominantly Western) art.

3. See Collingwood (1938: ch. XI) for a relevant articu-

lation of the idea of art as a language.4. In the third section of her poem Requiem, Anna

Akhmatova expresses her response to the arrest andexecution of her son at the hands of Stalin�s police;�No, it was not I, it is someone else who is suffering/

I could not have borne it� (Akhmatova, 1988: 90).5. See Haker (2006) for a recent review of this field.

Much has been written, from the perspectives of bothphilosophy and sociology, on the role of narrativeand storytelling in the expression and understanding

of illness (see Brody, 1987; Kleinmann, 1988; Schweizer,1997). While the current study is obviously indebted tosuch work, it will be clear that it is not an exercise in

narrative ethics as such. Rather, the current concernis with the contribution that all the arts, and not justliterature, can make to the understanding of suffering.

Further, it is concerned with the formal and expres-sive potential of those arts, an aspect frequentlyoverlooked or underplayed in the existing literature.

(For an exception, see Ridley�s (2002) use of NelsonGoodman�s account of exemplification.)

6. Responses to Arnold Schoenberg�s A Survivor fromWarsaw (op. 46) might illustrate this. The libretto ofthis short piece for orchestra, choir and narrator

recounts, from the perspective of the first person, theexperience of prisoners within the Warsaw Ghettobeing rounded up and beaten by German troops. The

piece concludes with the choir reproducing the pris-oners� spontaneous singing of the �Shema Yisroel�.The question that the work then poses is whether thisis �a last assertion of their human dignity against

the exterminators�, as one commentator puts it(MacDonald, 1976: 108), or an expression of ultimatefutility. The latter interpretation may be based upon

the music, which is frequently disturbingly at oddswith the narrative it supposedly expresses. The musicseemingly capitulates before the burden of expressing

anything so extreme. The orchestral accompanimentto the �Shema Yisroel� itself struggles against thechoir, rather than supporting it. Finally, the whole

piece ends abruptly, and the listener may be left toreflect that nothing was changed. The singing of the�Shema Yisroel� did not prevent the Holocaust, andmusic itself seems futile in the face of such suffering.

7. This image invites comparison to Frank�s chaos nar-

rative. Chaos may be characterised as a condition inwhich it does indeed seem better not to have beenborn, or indeed where the self is already nothing.

8. Consider an example, albeit an example from thevisual arts: Michelangelo�s Pieta of 1499 is a response

to suffering. If its religious context is put to one side,


it is an image of a mother lamenting the death of herson. The subject matter thus epitomises useless suffer-ing. Yet, it is a work of extraordinary beauty andgrace. Here, precisely, is the problem. The formal

beauty of the work betrays its subject matter as effec-tively as restitution narratives betray the experienceof chaos. Mary laments, reflectively, over her son.

She does not howl in anguish, nor does she force usto turn away in embarrassment at her pain. Sufferingis given meaning in the balance of the sculpture�scomposition, the elegance of its line, and ultimately inthe ease with which Mary bears the weight of herson, and of her own grief. Suffering has meaning

attributed to it within the refined preconceptions ofan elegant sculpture.

9. If I have understood Schweizer�s (1997) thesis cor-rectly, it is that there is an homology between theexperience of art and that of illness, for both con-

front us as immediately senseless or problematic. Mythesis differs, in that I am arguing that modernismthematises the hermeneutic problem of the art work,

forcing the spectator into a self-conscious engagementwith it. It is this problematisation of any conven-tional reading that allows modernism to intimate suf-fering.

10. This may be illustrated through two more of Michel-

angelo�s Pietas. Michelangelo�s treatment of thetheme gradually leads to more awkward and less wellformed works. In the Pieta of 1550, three figures,including Mary and Joseph of Arimathea, struggle to

support the weight of the dead body. The elegance ofthe 1499 Christ is lost, as the 1550 body lolls, and theinability of the mourners to support it hints at a des-

pair. The body has lost any meaning, and the suffer-ing inflicted by the death is at that momentirremediably useless. The Pieta of 1564 was left unfin-

ished upon Michelangelo�s death. Its lack of finishcontributes significantly to its impact. The figuresbarely emerge from the stone, and merely hint at thearticulation they may have received. But in this fact

the work comes to acknowledge its own inevitablefailure. It is unfinished and unfinishable, preciselybecause suffering cannot be assimilated into a coherent

aesthetic form. No �I think� can encompass such suffer-ing. The art work falls back into the silence of the stone.

11. The distinction between social and medical sufferingis not a complete one. The sociological thesis thatchronic illness brings about biographical disruption

can readily be inverted, to suggest that a cause ofchronic illness is a biographical disruption that isitself rooted in contemporary society. The structures,

practices and languages of contemporary capitalisminhibit the possibility of constructing coherent narra-tives of our lives, and the experience of illness is roo-ted in this inhibition (Williams, 2003: 106–107). Such

a perspective might allow the fusing of Adorno�ssocio-political approach with the current reading ofBeckett.

12. A disturbing example is offered by Alan Schechner�sSelf-Portrait at Buchenwald: It�s the Real Thing (of1993). By imposing his own image, clutching a can ofcoke, over a photograph of inmates of a death camp,

he forces us to reflect, not directly upon the sufferingof the camps, but rather upon its unassumability. Thecollage works by self-consciously exposing the failure

of images to encompass such suffering, and indeedtheir vulnerability to being trivialised (for example inthe theodicy of advertising, where �reality� is exempli-

fied by the possession of a soft drink).13. My thanks to two anonymous reviewers for stimulat-

ing comments on an earlier version of this paper thathave led, I hope, to significant improvements.

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The art of useless suffering