Pain - A Pleasure Principle

"What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle"

- Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents)

In March 2024 I was honoured to be invited to perform as part of the P.A.I.N Project Exhibition. The project, started by Berlin-based circus-kink performer, Enjo Flint, presents a meeting of performance artists whose creative practice acknowledges the diversity of pain.

The most powerful performance, for me personally, was that of Corazon de Robota who, whilst howling ‘PAIN’ self-flagellated for 20 minutes before pouncing into a desperate attack centred around the discordant state of modern warfare and the symbiotic torment that we individually internalise as a global collective from the world we are expected to survive in. Rare.

Flagellation as a practice is a symbolic religious practice in both Christianity and Islam. The ritual has also been practiced among members of several Egyptian and Greco-Roman cults and in BDSM practices. In religious contexts, it is practiced as a way to repent, a self-inflicted punishment.

The performative nature of this, and the other presentations which involved shibari rope performances and hook suspensions, opens a dialogue which unveils the potential for an aspect of empowered and active participation in one’s pain. This performative element of the exhibition is a concept rooted in many BDSM practices that involve ‘play’, an enactment of violence power play that is unifying in its embodied nature. 

“Pain is an illusion”, a poignant phrase coined by the Baron of Juxtaconcept, a founding member of the PAIN Project. These words resound intimately when we think of Freud’s concept the pleasure principle, that there is an intuitive human drive to avoid pain, we seek only pleasure. Our human nature is programmed to encounter both pleasure and pain, and perhaps in order to accept the disagreeable experience of pain, animating our gratification in it moves us towards expanding & unifying the human experience, as we observe it becomes subjugated by the state of pleasure.