"Suffering, Ineffability and Radical Bodily Doubt": An essay by Havi Carel (Keywords: Phenomenology;Embodiment;Transformative Experience;Epistemic Injustice;Vulnerability)
Havi Carel explores the challenge of articulating and understanding suffering, focusing on illness as a deeply embodied and transformative experience. Drawing on phenomenology, she examines how illness profoundly reshapes a person's relationship to their body, identity and environment. Carel reveals how illness disrupts the taken-for-granted certainty of bodily existence, leading to 'bodily doubt'. This gives way to uncertainty, vulnerability and sometimes the collapse of agency itself.