Zusammenfassung
This chapter aims to discuss a phenomenology of pain by drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, Erwin Straus’s concept of sensing, and Bernhard Waldenfels’s philosophy that retains the idea of the lived body but focuses on rupture and non-coincidence within experience. It describes a concept of pain as process and the question of the experience of the body in pain. The concepts Waldenfels suggests to subvert the traditional phenomenological notion of intentionality from within are particularly elucidating. Pain seems to be a paradigmatic case of this kind of dys-appearance, which Merleau-Ponty largely ignores. Speaking of the pain of loss is not a metaphor, and separation and death hurt just as much as physical injury—albeit in a different way.
