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

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).

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).