Rather, Sartwell tries to understand pain as we experience it and as it happens to us, by avoiding the temptation towards intellectual abstraction and the need to construct meanings. These abstractions and constructed meanings have caused us to flee from ourselves, our bodies, and each other. I am often intolerable to you and you are often intolerable to me. So I cease to deal with you and start to deal with a concept under which I can subsume you or into which I can annihilate you, so that you live on in the realm of my concepts in a sort of flickering afterlife. Since many of our traditional values and social institutions are based on these concepts and abstractions, the logical outcomes of this openness through pain are seen in the challenges of both obscenity and anarchy.
Obscenity is our abstracted notions of the taboos surrounding the body.
Anarchy is our abstracted notions of taboos surrounding the state. Sartwell makes the case for both as a release from the virtual, sterile world of institutions and mores, which do not keep us safe from reality, but more often, perpetuate old hypocrisies and create new dangers. We discover a new drug, a seminar, a technique, a consumer device to ward off every bit of physical or emotional discomfort. Where he falters most of the time is not so much the presentation of his themes, but in his arrogant opinions on the great thinkers of the past. Not many philosophers in the Western tradition coincide with his radical ideas, with the exception of Nietzsche, whom is credited as originator of the concept of pain.