Critical events

But is such theory of suffering adequate for understanding the body as it mediates between the
individual and social levels of existence in the construction of the normal? If we look at the normal
contexts in which, for instance, the neophyte is made to submit to painful mutilations of the body –
as in the initiation rituals of several societies – we may come to regard pain not as a somatized form
of social criticism but rather as the means by which society integrates its members into a single
moral community. “ p. 178

Clastres goes further and argues that,

afier the rites are completed and all suffering has been forgotten,
there remains a surplus. This is in the form of traces of the wounds
that are lefi on the body. A man who has been initiated becomes
a man who has been marked. In the initiation rituals, society puts
its mark on the individual. The mark becomes an obstacle to
forgetting-the body thus becomes memory. p. 179

The initiation ritual is then, according to Clastres, a pedagogy

of affirmation and non-dialogue in which young people learn that
they are members of a community, neither more nor less, and are
irretrievably marked as such. The law which is written on their
bodies is not the law of the king or the law of the state, but the
law of society. Initiation rituals establish a triple alliance between
writing, law, and the body, which achieves a consubstantiation
between the individual, the group, and the law of society. p. 179

Thus Durkheim conceives of the individual not only as

marked by a dualism (a fact repeatedly emphasized in the socio-
logical and anthropological literature) but also sees the body and
its violent transformation as the most enduring witness to a con-
substantiation between the social and the individual. 'The best
way of proving to oneselfand to others that one is a member of a
certain group is to place a distinctive mark on the body' (emphasis
added), for the object of such a mark is not to represent or to
bring to mind a certain object 'but to bear witness to the fact that
a certain number of individuals participate in the same moral life.' p. 79

Three points are notable in these reflections. First, the equivalence

between injury and pain, so that the infliction of pain on a person
who has caused injury by failing in any of his obligations to us is
seen as just. Second, memory is created through the infliction of
pain and, most remarkably, the direction of this memory is not
the past but the future. Third, to fail one's creditor is to submit
one's body to 'every kind of indignity and torture'.l 183

I have argued that in order to create a moral community through

the sharing of pain, as was envisaged by Durkheim, individual If, however, pain
destroys one's capacity to communicate, how can it ever bc
brought into the sphere ofpublic articulation? It is my submission
that the expression of pain is an invitation to share. Even when
pain inflicted cruelly and without any apparent reason destroys
my friendship with my body, it cannot be treated as a purely
personal experience. This argument was so beautifully formulated
by Wittgenstein that I can do nothing more than recapture his
formulation. (See Jones 1971; Wittgenstein 1953, 1958). p. 194