Pain in the first Person. The Experience of Illness in Une mort très douce (S. De Beauvoir) in Dialogue with Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem and Foucault

Abstract

From the reading of Une mort très douce, an autobiographical novel by Simone De Beauvoir, I will propose in this work to reflect on the Merleaupontyan notion of the lived body, particularly in the experience of pain. Beyond the specific philosophical differences that the author has with Merleau-Ponty, I will focus on the loans that she has, indeed, taken from the French phenomenologist. I consider that Une mort très douce is an exemplary story that allows to illuminate and deepen some questions that have not been sufficiently developed by Merleau-Ponty, namely, the specificity of the status of the hospitalized suffering phenomenal body, in a situation of terminal illness. In turn, the novel invites us to reflect on the limits established between normality/pathology, and vulgar knowledge/ scientific knowledge presented by Georges Canguilhem, which are articulated with the economic and political dimension of medicine as an institution, indicated by Michel Foucault. Likewise, in this text the experiential situation of disease allows the philosopher to revisit her own thinking from a more empathic perspective regarding certain questions about motherhood sustained in Le deuxième sexe. Somehow, the process of agony of a person extends intercorporeally to who is under his care: thus, this account of pain is especially illustrative to point out, with Merleau-Ponty, the impossibility of reducing the body to a description in third person.