On the Benefits of Expressing Pain Through Anger. Restored Subjectivity and the Perverse Desire to Belong in Thomas Bernhard’s Short Stories Cover Image

O pożytkach z gniewnych ekspresji bólu. Przywrócona podmiotowość i perwersyjne pragnienie przynależności w kontekście opowiadań Thomasa Bernharda
On the Benefits of Expressing Pain Through Anger. Restored Subjectivity and the Perverse Desire to Belong in Thomas Bernhard’s Short Stories

Author(s): Sebastian Porzuczek
Subject(s): Short Story, Austrian Literature, Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Psychology, Behaviorism, Health and medicine and law
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Keywords: Bernhard Thomas; pain; suffering; anger; medicine;

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this article is to present the relation between pain and anger in Thomas Bernhard’s autobiographical stories: Der Atem. Eine Entscheidung and Die Kälte. Eine Isolation. The Austrian writer precisely reconstructs the social context of recognising disease and the status of suffering in institutional medicine. In this article, the tension between individual experience of pain and therapeutic procedures is analysed in the context of power and domination. However, the author pays special attention to the problem of subjective transformation of pain into anger (the logic of rebellion, agon).

  • Issue Year: 2019
  • Issue No: 42
  • Page Range: 81-98
  • Page Count: 18
  • Language: Polish