"What if there were something radically liberating in this experience? What if we were forced to grasp — through pain and illness, those sweeping levelers — the world as it might otherwise be or could have been? Boyer quotes Julien Teppe, founder of the pain-positive Dolorist movement, who wrote in 1935, “I consider extreme anguish, particularly that of somatic origin, as the perfect incitement for developing pure idealism.” She also quotes the German Socialist Patients’ Collective, who wrote in 1993, “Illness becomes the undeniable challenge to revolutionize everything — yes, everything! — for the first time really and in the right way.” She recounts the (failed) leper uprising of 1321, when lepers organized and planned to pollute water sources throughout France with “a mix of their urine and blood and four different herbs and a sanctified body,” which would render all the healthy sick; those who survived would emerge as natural leaders.

Boyer explores the possibility of pain as idealism, of pain as revolution, honesty, equality — not as something to aspire to or idealize, but as something that cuts to the quick and necessarily alters everything around you, everything inside of you, and demands a new form — a new world — that can meet it. As Boyer writes, “pain’s education should be in more than pain’s valorization,” and “we can’t think ourselves free, but that’s no reason not to get an education.” 

Emily LaBarge