Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.CitesClass[12]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[13]

Details

Caselist.CitesClass[12]

EntryDate

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1		-2017-05-10 19:25:47.447
	1	+2017-05-10 19:25:47.0

Caselist.CitesClass[13]

Cites

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	1	+====The 1AC’s display of unhappiness and injury separates pain from its bodily containment in the Other, rendering the wound as an object to be obtained. Their narrative positions the judge as a subject to appropriate and then resolve this pain only when they are compelled enough to care, where each ‘successful’ ballot elevates their power over an increasingly invisible Other.====
	2	+**Ahmed 04** (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, "The Contingency of Pain", 2004, Routledge, New York, pp 20-22 //Accessed 1/15/17 KAE)
	3	+How does pain enter politics? How are lived experiences of pain shaped by contact with others? Pain has often been described as a private, even lonely experience, as a feeling that I have that others cannot have, or as a feeling that others have that I myself cannot feel (Kotarba 1983: 15). And yet the pain of others is continually evoked in public discourse, as that which demands a collective as well as individual response. In the quote above from a Christian Aid letter, the pain of others is first presented through the use of the word ‘landmines’. The word is not accompanied by a description or history; it is assumed that the word itself is enough to evoke images of pain and suffering for the reader.2 Indeed, the word is repeated in the letter, and is transformed from ‘sign’ to the ‘agent’ behind the injuries: ‘Landmines are causing pain and suffering all around the world.’ Of course, this utterance speaks a certain truth. And yet, to make landmines the ‘cause’ of pain and suffering is to stop too soon in a chain of events: landmines are themselves effects of histories of war; they were placed by humans to injure and maim other humans. The word evokes that history, but it also stands for it, as a history of war, suffering and injustice. Such a letter shows us how the language of pain operates through signs, which convey histories that involve injuries to bodies, at the same time as they conceal the presence or ‘work’ of other bodies. The letter is addressed to ‘friends’ of Christian Aid, those who have already made donations to the charity. It focuses on the emotions of the reader who is interpellated as ‘you’, as the one who ‘probably’ has certain feelings about the suffering and pain of others. So ‘you’ probably feel ‘angry’ or ‘saddened’. The reader is presumed to be moved by the injuries of others, and it is this movement that enables them to give. To this extent, the letter is not about the other, but about the reader: the reader’s feelings are the ones that are addressed, which are the ‘subject’ of the letter. The ‘anger’ and ‘sadness’ the reader should feel when faced with the other’s pain is what allows the reader to enter into a relationship with the other, premised on generosity rather than indifference. The negative emotions of anger and sadness are evoked as the reader’s: the pain of others becomes ‘ours’, an appropriation that transforms and perhaps even neutralises their pain into our sadness. It is not so much that we are ‘with them’ by feeling sad; the apparently shared negative feelings do not position the reader and victim in a relation of equivalence, or what Elizabeth V. Spelman calls co-suffering (Spelman 1997: 65). Rather, we feel sad about their suffering, an ‘aboutness’ that ensures that they remain the object of ‘our feeling’. So, at one level, the reader in accepting the imperative to feel sad about the other’s pain is aligned with the other. But the alignment works by differentiating between the reader and the others: their feelings remain the object of ‘my feelings’, while my feelings only ever approximate the form of theirs. It is instructive that the narrative of the letter is hopeful. The letter certainly promises a lot. What is promised is not so much the overcoming of the pain of others, but the empowerment of the reader: ‘I hope you feel a sense of empowerment.’ The pain of the other is overcome, but it is not the object of hope in the narrative; rather, the overcoming of the pain is instead a means by which the reader is empowered. So the reader, whom we can name inadequately as the ‘Western subject’, feels better after hearing about individual stories of success, narrated as the overcoming of pain as well as the healing of community. These stories are about the lives of individuals that have been saved: ‘Chamreun is a survivor of a landmine explosion and, having lost his leg, is all the more determined to make his community a safer place in which to live.’ These stories of bravery, of the overcoming of pain, are indeed moving. But interestingly the agent in the stories is not the other, but the charity, aligned here with the reader: through ‘your regular support’, you have ‘helped to bring about’ these success stories. Hence the narrative of the letter ends with the reader’s ‘empowerment’. The word ‘landmines’, it is suggested, now makes ‘you’ feel a sense of empowerment, rather than anger or sadness. This letter and the charitable discourses of compassion more broadly show us that stories of pain involve complex relations of power. As Elizabeth V. Spelman notes in Fruits of Sorrow, ‘Compassion, like other forms of caring, may also reinforce the very patterns of economic and political subordination responsible for such suffering’ (Spelman 1997: 7). In the letter, the reader is empowered through a detour into anger and sadness about the pain of others. The reader is also elevated into a position of power over others: the subject who gives to the other is the one who is ‘behind’ the possibility of overcoming pain. The over-representation of the pain of others is significant in that it fixes the other as the one who ‘has’ pain, and who can overcome that pain only when the Western subject feels moved enough to give. In this letter, generosity becomes a form of individual and possibly even national character; something ‘I’ or ‘we’ have, which is ‘shown’ in how we are moved by others. The transformation of generosity into a character trait involves fetishism: it forgets the gifts made by others (see Diprose 2002), as well as prior relations of debt accrued over time. In this case, the West gives to others only insofar as it is forgotten what the West has already taken in its very capacity to give in the first place. In the Christian Aid letter, feelings of pain and suffering, which are in part effects of socio-economic relations of violence and poverty, are assumed to be alleviated by the very generosity that is enabled by such socio-economic relations. So the West takes, then gives, and in the moment of giving repeats as well as conceals the taking.

EntryDate

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	1	+2017-05-10 19:25:48.405

Judge

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	1	+x

Opponent

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	1	+x

ParentRound

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	1	+11

Round

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	1	+4

Team

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	1	+Lake Travis Ehresman Neg

Title

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	1	+JANFEB - Feminist Killjoy K - Narrative Link

Tournament

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	1	+Harvard