Pain

Pain is presented as a bodily condition lived before it is made an object of reflection. In the example of eyes aching during a difficult reading, it is neither an extra sensation laid over the world nor a fact first identified by looking inward: it is the contingent texture of consciousness as it reads, and a strain consciousness can only exist by reaching beyond it toward a less painful possibility.

Pain in the Act of Reading

The reader’s attention is directed toward a book and, through it, toward the truths the book discloses. The body is not apprehended for itself; it functions as a point of view and a point of departure. Words appear successively, while the unread words remain part of a layered ground: the page is organized against the book, and the book against the world. The reader makes the words pass under the eyes, yet the bodily movement is not ordinarily isolated as an object of awareness.

The ache can nevertheless alter how the book appears. Words may tremble or quiver, their meaning may demand effort, and sentences may have to be read two or three times before they register as understood. These signs can disappear when reading absorbs the reader; forgetting the pain does not mean it has ceased. If a later reflective act brings it to notice, the pain is given as having been there all along. The passage distinguishes these effects on reading from the more basic question of how consciousness exists its pain.

Neither a Bodily Object nor a Location

Pain in the eyes is not produced by a hidden local signal or by knowledge that identifies a bodily site. It is not first a neutral pain and then an inference about where it is. Rather, it is the eyes as consciousness exists them, and is distinguished from pain in a finger or stomach through its very manner of being, not by an added criterion. Calling it pain in the eyes clarifies the example for the reader; consciousness itself need not name or know it in order to live it.

Nor does this pain occupy a place among the things being read. It is not to the right or left of the book, among the truths disclosed by it, or in the body as an object that another person can see and that the reader can partly touch and see. It is also not an overlay or harmony superimposed on perceived things. Pain is not in space, and it does not belong to objective time as one event among others. It temporalizes itself; through that temporalization, world-time can appear.

Contingency and the Flight from Pain

The ache is described instead as the translucent matter of consciousness: its being-there, its attachment to the world, and the peculiar contingency of the reading act. It persists beyond attention and knowledge because it slips into each act of attending and knowing. The account thus refuses to treat pain as a separate psychic object standing outside the activity it affects.

Pain-consciousness is also an internal negation of the world and a wrenching away from itself. Consciousness lives its pain only by surpassing it, projecting toward a further consciousness whose texture and being-there would not be painful. This escape does not leave pain behind as an independent thing: the inexpressible condition consciousness would flee is rediscovered at the heart of the flight, because the flight itself remains contingent and embodied. The reading example makes the structure visible in the book’s appearance as something to be read in a hurried, jerky rhythm, with words pressing into an infernal, fixed round and the universe pierced with anxiety. Pain therefore marks, at once, consciousness’s effort to get beyond its condition and the condition it cannot simply shed.