A Subaltern Pain: The Problem of Violence in Philosophy’s Pain Discourse

The scientific and philosophical approach to pain must be supplemented by a hermeneutics studying how racism has complicated the communication of pain. Such an investigation reveals that not only are non-white people seen as credibly speaking their pain, but also pain “science” is one of the ways races have historically been constructed. I illustrate this through a study of Frantz Fanon’s clinical writings, along with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave-owners’ medical manuals and related documents. I suggest that, with this history, what philosophers understand as the problem of pain is best framed as the problem of colonial violence.