ABSTRACT
A sustained engagement with the discourse of medicine constitutes one of the preoccupations of Howard Barker’s work. Taking Barker’s He Stumbled as its focal point, this chapter explores how medicine is depicted to diminish and elide the holistic nature of human experience through its objectifying, atomistic, and analytical approach – emblematised by the acts of dissection and self-dissection. The crux of this chapter is the exploration of how the question and experience of ‘depth’ and ‘intimacy’ – as critical sites of embodied self-knowledge and evental relationship with the other – are treated by the discourse and practice of medicine as presented in Barker’s work. It argues that Barker presents a phenomenological-evental alternative to the biomedical discourse by demonstrating not only how, in his Theatre of Catastrophe, pain is treated as a possibility for self-knowledge and self-transcendence but also how the body is conceived to be inherently evental and intertwined with history, alterity, and language.
