March 2012 – March 2022. Lying on my bed in front of this text, I underline a decade of chronic pain, this pain that is said to be “rebellious” because medicine cannot stop it. These pains which last, which resist and in front of which the medical profession is silent, shakes its head, looks away, leaves the room. Science bows down, it lowers its arms, abandoning that which suffers to the power of that which causes suffering. As I write these lines, Ukraine is on fire and bloodshed, the dead are accumulating and also the evidence of torture, assassination and rape used as weapons of war. All these martyred bodies, shown in the newspapers and on television, presented to the UN as much as to the European and North American populations as proof of the horror and plea: “Please, repeats the Ukrainian President in the name of of his fellow citizens, help us. » […]
American photographer Nan Goldin, recognized for her way of documenting her life and that of her friends and community, created a collective in 2017 under the name PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), whose objective is is to expose the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma for the false production and marketing of an opioid under the name OxyContin – a commercial strategy responsible for one million deaths due to accidental overdoses. The drug was made available to the public in increasingly larger doses, at the same time that Purdue Pharma maintained that it was non-addictive (which it was not).
Purdue Pharma was dissolved following a lawsuit it lost in August 2021, and the Sackler family is set to pay $6 billion in fines over the next decade. Nevertheless, the Sacklers keep their fortune — moreover, the penalty corresponds to the interest that will accumulate during this period. The families of the victims will receive at most $40,000 and will never really be heard. The trial, civil, protects the Sacklers from any future prosecution, when they should have been prosecuted criminally, underlines the collective. Hence the importance, for Goldin, of demonstrating to museums which, over time, have pocketed donations from the Sackler family, affixed this name to certain wings, participated in laundering this particularly hidden form of crime. […]
ideas in review
But what about people living with chronic pain now? What can relieve them? If the Sackler family has managed to amass gargantuan sums of money, it is because opioid-type drugs have the power to make pain disappear, to remind sufferers what it means to live without pain – even if that causes them to increase the dose as soon as the pain starts to show up again to send it back into the dark at all costs.
Goldin experienced it herself, having paid dearly for this addiction following a severe fall that left her with a shattered wrist, a pinched nerve, excruciating pain. From OxyContin to heroin and Fentanyl, from the drugstore to the streets: Goldin’s journey has led her to fight against those who make their fortunes on the back of human pain. […]
Even today, we are witnessing an idealization of pain, and in particular of pain in the feminine. Mythification of the (young) sick woman, as Leslie Jamison points out about literature, which has the effect of aestheticizing and sentimentalizing suffering, whether physical or psychological, to the detriment of what this suffering really does : wrong. Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Marguerite Duras, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag and, more recently, other writers in Quebec and elsewhere explore their experience of illness and pain, a way of making the suffering body appear and of giving it its letters of nobility. Intimate literature, writing in fragments, display and shamelessness, stories of illness and pain represent a political gesture […].
Some artists fight against the invisibilization of pain, the non-representation of bodies modified, transformed, made other by the experience of illness and pain. Bodies considered less “beautiful”, less “presentable”, because of this experience. Bodies perceived as ‘abnormal’, and therefore marginalized, which some would prefer to disappear from view lest they contaminate them, as if that were a sign of bad luck, birds of bad omen. Or simply because these bodies remind us that we are safe from nothing, and that our “normal” bodies have nothing normal about them, that they only serve to calm (awkwardly, even violently) anxiety: the fear caused by what reminds us of our fragility, how ephemeral and small we are, how little we matter in relation to the world…
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