Miguel Ángel Hernández — The Pain of Others
Spanish novelist and art theorist Miguel Ángel Hernández explores how contemporary art confronts trauma, suffering, and empathy in a culture saturated with images of pain.
Why we picked this
Hernández works at the intersection of literary fiction and art theory — a rare combination that lets him ask questions about images and suffering that neither discipline asks well on its own.
Miguel Ángel Hernández is a professor of art history at the University of Murcia and the author of several works that cross between fiction and critical theory. The Pain of Others takes up a question that sits at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, and politics: what does it mean to look at representations of suffering, and what does art owe to the people whose pain it depicts?
The book draws on Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others — itself one of the most important essays on photography and war of the past century — but pushes into territory Sontag didn’t explore: the contemporary art world’s particular relationship with trauma, the commodification of suffering, and what empathy actually requires of a viewer.
Hernández’s work is unusual in that it takes both the fiction and the theory seriously. The conversation with Tope Folarin — a novelist whose own work deals with race and displacement — promises to go beyond the academic into the genuinely difficult questions the book raises. This is an afternoon event for readers who want to think about what art is actually for.