At the Edge of Being

This book represents a challenge to the influential medico-political discourse that seeks to classify and manage chronic pain as if it were a disease in its own right, while at the same time preserving its status as a symptom. The chapters in this volume confront this view with timely reminders that pain as lived experience remains an elusive and puzzling phenomenon (an APORIA) that cannot be better understood by putting aside its phenomenology and simplifying what is left to fit a metaphorical pigeon-hole as a distinct biomedical disease entity. The authors amply demonstrate that there are other useful frames of reference with equal or even better claims to both legitimacy and usefulness. Readers will be encouraged to contemplate the aporia in different contexts and expressed through a variety of experiences.