"Disturbing phenomenology" in the pain and engagement narratives of Cambodian American survivors of the Killing Fields.

In the clinical literature on trauma, the atrocity survivor's attempt to engage others around the experience of chronic, intractable pain is often viewed as an instance of "help-seeking," logotherapeutic "coherence-making," or-more darkly-"patient malingering." In this article, I challenge the utility of these rubrics through a close examination of the pain and engagement narratives of two survivors of the Cambodian Killing Fields. I demonstrate that survivor narratives can obtain a strategic multivocality, oscillating between phenomenological account and political critique, between clinical description and moral exhortation. This discursive oscillation, speaking "on and to several different levels of experience at the same time" [Levin DM (1998) Int J Philos Stud 6(3):345-392], radically disturbs the audience's conventional sensibilities and distancing-making moves (for example, crafting totalizing accounts of the meaning of suffering or counterfactually speculating about the survivor's experiences of pain). This disturbance allows the survivor's narrative to function hermeneutically, enabling the audience to glimpse the moral significance of strategic multivocality for the survivor's efforts to engage others while tracing its performative responsibilities and possibilities for ourselves. Reading pain and engagement narratives this way forces us into a place of equivocation and ambiguity that makes possible new configurations of sense, meaning, and response. It is, thus, as disturbing phenomenology that the women's narratives derive their greatest practical power and urgency.