Suffer Well: A Mellon Sawyer Seminar 2019-2020

"Suffer Well" brings together scholars, artists, and medical practitioners to explore human suffering as both the limit of communication and expression and the event horizon from which new forms of sociality and social formation may be made possible.

The main purpose of “Suffer Well” is to create a dialogue around how different disciplines attend to and develop modes of understanding suffering. While suffering is an existential theme, the contemporary attention to and attitude of suffering has not been able to engage the question of suffering in a comprehensive way. Instead, suffering is regarded and, at times, treated as a problem that may be alleviated by measurable pathways, whether pharmacological, therapeutic, linguistic, or political. Yet the experience of suffering exceeds recompense, reflects social as well as medical causes, and demands new forms of social response beyond the analgesic. This seminar attempts to bring these various approaches to suffering into conversation in order to understand how attention to suffering can lead us to rethink the relationship between the subjective experience of one person’s suffering to suffering on larger scales, from households to communities.

To attend to suffering not in the name of simple and simplistic alleviation, but rather an attention to suffering as something to behold and wonder is to imagine suffering as a painful, even excruciating, portal through which new social formations and even political models might emerge, if we pay attention to what happens when we pay attention to suffering. This kind of attention requires the marshalling of every discipline for which forms of language and communication are the main vocation—verbal, visual, sonic, haptic, to name just a few—to find new allocations of language to approximate the experiences of suffering, and to register where and when suffering still requires silent witnessing as monument.

Suffer Well is a Sawyer Seminar funded by the Mellon Foundation. Events under three themes - Medical Humanities, Disabilities Studies and Incarceration/Detention - are listed in the Center for Medical Humanities calendar with the designation "Suffer Well."