The language of pain, stretching back to antiquity, conflated the emotional and the physical. The overlap of grief, anguish, despair and sorrow with physical pain lies at the heart of vernacular expressions of suffering in Ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi and Chinese, as well as in English and other European languages. For thousands of years, the statement ‘I am in pain’ was an emotional as well as a physical claim. While this semantic overlap seems consistent, the precise conceptualisation has varied enormously, from ὀδύvη (odúnē, Ancient Greek) to dolor (Latin), to wajaʿ (Arabic), to dard (Farsi, Hindi and Urdu), to tòng (Chinese). Moreover, there is a rich history of the iconography of the ineffable: representations of pain that, while it could not be uttered, was nonetheless expressed. By documenting the historically situated processes of experiencing and expressing types of pain, it is possible to show both an enormous variety while insisting upon a long history of the braiding of the emotional and the physical. This has the effect, in turn, of implicitly de-naturalising and situating present-day experiences of pain and of disrupting two centuries of modern medical expertise.

“My loyalty to the past — my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most.”

“I want catastrophe, fighting, tears. I want to be devoured, I want to punch people. I’m restless.”

“I take great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away.”

“You have me. Until every last star in the galaxy dies. You have me.”

Red Rosa Now has vanished too Is hid from View She told the poor What life is about And so the rich Have rubbed Her out

“Seduction involves the appeal of destroying that which seduces us.”

“There are ghosts in the machine - a certain kind of spectrality is intrinsic to the speaking subject. Not any substantial subject perhaps, but the subject who speaks, the subject, that is to say, composed out of the undead, discorporate stuff of language.”

“We only see the violence of change…Are we aware of how much violence goes on just to keep things the way they are?”

“Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself. James Joyce”

“Disgust relies on moral obtuseness. It is possible to view another human being as a slimy slug or a piece of revolting trash only if one has never made a serious good-faith attempt to see the world through that person’s eyes or to experience that person’s feelings. Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only through the exercise of imagination.”