ABSTRACT
Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Erwin Straus and Bernhard Waldenfels, the chapter conceives of pain as a complex experience that should be understood as a process within our interaction with the world, a specific mode of sensing rather than a single quality or entity. It describes the experience of the body in pain as a materialization that calls into question the idea of a unitary lived body and reveals it as heterogeneous. Finally it briefly turns to the question of meaning, insisting on the disruptive and disturbing character of pain.
