Life of Pain: Remarks about Negativity and Effort in Georges Canguilhem

In Le Normal et le Pathologique, Canguilhem defines health with a biting phrase he borrows from the surgeon René Leriche. Health, he writes, is "the body in the silence of the organs". What Canguilhem means is that, when man is not ill, his body "functions" in concert with the environment, and so he doesn't notice its presence. Noises, on the other hand, are produced when people are ill, or when they are at risk of becoming ill. The body's primary language is therefore that of pain. It is in and through the experience of pain that we realize that we have a body with organs, whose behavior and "allures of life" are liable to change. Canguilhem adds that the state of health is therefore "the subject's unconsciousness of his body, whereas consciousness of the body is given in feelings of limits, threats and obstacles to health". This enables Canguilhem to assert the thesis that a living being's self-consciousness depends on pain and illness. Without the ordeal of pain, man, like any other living being, not only doesn't know he's ill, but has no reason to assert a "normal" identity, which therefore remains silent, implicit or, rather, non-existent. In the study we study the genesis of these ideas, connecting them to the problem of muscular effort, present all over 19th and 20th century philosophy and connected to the heritage of Maine de Biran's philosophy.