Mariano Mussi and Oliver Vodeb: The Emancipatory Design of Suffering
Argentinian medical epidemiologist, family physician, and philosopher Mariano Mussi introduces the idea of the emancipatory potentials of suffering. In this episode Marianno Mussi and Oliver Vodeb explore how radical intimacy is the answer to impossibilities, which cause suffering. In a capitalist society the aim is not to cure suffering but to create value. Radical Intimacy manifests in acts of rearranging relationalities of the social organization of care as work.
How could suffering constitute an opportunity for emancipation? Not concepts but suffering as experience: the individual event, which occurs here and now, the suffering of this or that person. What happens to the individual who suffers? To some extent, the name and content we give to experiences of suffering constitute the confluence of innumerable acts of design, historically stabilized in various forms of clinical work. We then shape experience, generalize it into concepts, and inscribe it in a set of social relations: We make suffering an object on which an intervention is possible. Can the sufferer work? Does he need constant care from others?
Read the whole chapter in Radical Intimacies, Designing Non-Extractive Relationalities: here.
* and in the end of this episode we discuss poetry. As a means to heal and to resist. To understand and to build intimacy. All poems by Mariano Mussi, exclusively published here:
Fragility
Fragility,
not desire, nor power, nor the one-eyed and all-powerful god of work,
nor the goddess of technology, nor ambition, nor the indomitable spirit of humans
crawling in the rottenness of life
–in the rich, pulsating and generous rottenness–;
not charity, nor brotherhood, nor justice,
not power in any of its stony, phallic and pretentious forms,
but fragility,
the blue marble floating in the most absolute abandonment,
with its thin film of air held to the surface
by the ineffable whims of matter.
Brittle life,
fragility upon fragility,
untamable.
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Suffering
I.
Infatuated suffering,
with its pains
beyond any understanding.
The voice of the sufferer is unleashed and speaks,
sings,
dances,
paints his suffering, forces
words to say the unspeakable.
We, meanwhile, remain silent:
it is better not to have expectations
but to be expectant,
slightly naive,
open to what might escape the abyss.
If we are patient,
we will achieve from his suffering something collective
that will then be manipulable,
the object of a possible activity.
A part will become history and we will know later,
with a quick glance,
what to do with other sufferings.
From suffering we will extract a useful disease,
a tool,
and also a shadow.
And there will always remain another part without words,
only an uncomfortable look at ourselves
that will be repeated,
need after need.
Where the weakness of certainties is fractured
the future invades and illuminates.
Experience
stops the thinking
about things
and sows in language
and in great ideas
the seed of restlessness,
of uneasiness,
of sensuality.
II.
Suffering is kindled
in an incomprehensible powerlessness
over which looms
a threat of an end.
Not being able to sustain the repetition of days,
the regularity of the work that ignores the slow catastrophe of the world,
not being able to be employed by the will of others any longer,
nor tolerate the most insane and necessary immediacy of wages.
Not being able to continue being who we are supposed have to be
and becoming invalid objects of solidarity.
Not being able to continue with what we were,
the same,
even if the same
is only stubbornness.
Because it may happen that we suffer
from not being able to bear repetition
in a universe that is slowly tearing itself apart,
or from making a problem of ourselves
and wanting to be more,
to run faster, jump higher,
to enjoy more intensely.
And also, why not,
from not allowing ourselves the freedom of sadness,
when being sad is the most sensible thing to do.
Impossibility
is the impossibility of someone
who, whether he wants it or not,
chooses himself.
Suffering is a revolutionary opportunity.
The clinic, a major political activity,
can reproduce workers and the disabled
as well as free beings.
What is interpreted is there to deceive us.
Disease, need for what?
The hunger that is satisfied
with a nasogastric tube
is not the same as the one that is satisfied
with a knife and fork.
Freedom is, at least in part, asking oneself
what is beyond the tube,
the knife
and the fork:
What can there be in the future?
What suffering is announcing it?
The clinical task is free only from its well-held history
and, from each one,
it returns to the whole:
the environment and its demands,
the others and their demands,
the living tool that evolves.
Each experience of suffering
is an opportunity to transform the world.
The clinic is a revolutionary task.
In our merchandise-producing world,
Suffering is nothing but the limit of work,
a reduced cluster of diseases
that seeks to account
from all the challenges of existence.
Being alive is a struggle to the death, and love
a disproportionate effort.
In suffering, all forms of the possible pulsate.
Dealing with the infinite diversity,
encouraging the broadest multiplicity,
the cure is that attempt,
the promise of diverse,
individual needs, different like each one of us.
Sooner or later,
our passions will become so obstinate and multiple
that they will be able to mobilize the action of all,
capable of taking us to the stars,
to the very heart of all things.
-----------------------------------
Cure
Curiosity,
attention,
care,
company,
cure.
The goal is not to put the productive body back into operation,
or to rescue the duties of work.
Neither a definitive solution, nor a repair of the human motor.
Cure opens up possibilities.
It transforms and relieves.
There may be no way to treat an illness,
but there are always ways to cure a sufferer.
Because it is not about never dying,
about continuing to function eternally,
but about ceasing to be who we are not,
again and again,
until we find ourselves.
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PODCAST CREDITS:
Hosted by: Oliver Vodeb/ Memefest
The podcast is a collaboration between Memefest and Intellect publishers.
Music: Thanks to Bait for their song Property Law.
Two best friends meeting seasonally in bucolic surrounds to generate improvised music. Property Law recognises the Indigenous peoples of the world's relationship to land. As in, "we don't own the land. The land owns us." Each of us is only passing through. Empires, Epochs come & go, but the spirit of the land persists.