The Pain(s) of Modernity: From Nietzsche’s Overman toTranshumanism

Abstract

The early twentieth century constitutes a cultural epoch in which the significance and metaphorics of bodily pain were renegotiated on multiple levels and placed into question. This article demonstrates how the emerging discourse succeeded in bundling previously disparate motifs- cultural decline, the perceived failures of modern
natural science, and the notion of pain as a catalyst of fateful forces- into a coherent intellectual framework. The consequence was a far reaching rupture with naïve faith in progress and with a bourgeois world and value order, a rupture that heralded the onset of modernity.