Positive and Negative Models of Suffering: An Anthropology of Our Shifting Cultural Consciousness of Emotional Discontent (original) (raw)
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This essay proposes a critical investigation of the notion of suffering as a premise and warning for the Social and Political domains. Drawing from the writings of the contemporary French philosophers Levinas, Marion, Ricœur and Blanchot, comprising a corpus I refer to as “The Ethics of Suffering”, it treats this issue in four stages of analysis: terminological, phenomenological, ethical and political. The phenomenological analysis first reveals the tension resulting from the double nature of “Suffering”, defined both as a feeling and a long lasting condition. This duality leads then to question our social ability to simply apply suffering based on the fact that it is widespread and known to all, showing that the lack of a permanent substance or single essence causes its political prevention or propagation to remain totally arbitrary. On this account, the positive outcome of the ethical and phenomenological investigations consists in offering a standard ground for bridging between individual and social suffering while sustaining the tension coming from its dual nature. At the same time, their definition of suffering as a basis for solidarity (suffering is always ‘suffering with the others’) while insisting on the solitary mode of torment reveals a problematic double bind. Taking up the work of Adi Ophir on the evil, the essay goes as far as showing how this double bind affects the political thought and action, when exposing its rather limited power of manipulating the human threshold and using suffering as a political instrument. The paper thus seeks to contribute to the social and political discussion by examining our ability to regulate our conduct in the public and the political spheres through the understanding of suffering and by examining whether we can actually protect ourselves and cope with the danger of controlling individuals through the control of their suffering.
Suffering in Contemporary Society
2021
Suffering points in every direction. It unites and separate us, makes us feel alive, yet close to death. Suffering makes us hide and act, love and kill. From the primal scream of the newly born to the oftenpainful last sip of air that we breathe, suffering pervades our entire lives. We feel it through the core nerve of our being, and suffering, in Kierkegaard's words, "nails us to ourselves". There is nowhere to hide and yet there is. The world was always one of others and through them, our lives acquire its form and its bearing. Yet these others cannot be trusted; they betray, grew old, sick and finally, they too must die. The relational shields that protect and mark who we are can alleviate but not protect us from suffering. As Løgstrup (1997) has suggested, it is through the irrevocable unshareability of suffering that the need to attest our inner experiences and articulate these through language or action emerges. It is thus the solitude of suffering that creates the active need to connect with others, and on the one hand, we find ourselves, with Alphonso Lingis' (1994) words, in "the community of those who have nothing in common". On the other, riots and revolutions often testify to the potential of suffering to unite across the borders that otherwise tends to diverge us. As Martin Hägglund (2019) has pointed out, all of us find ourselves thrown into a world that leaves much to wish for-none of us have asked for this life, and yet we are asked to carry it; to "own our lives". Mental states are never identical to brain states (Kripke, 1980) and the agonies that humans undergo always point to us as spiritual beings, to suffering being more than pain. Shortly after the world has begun to make sense, reflexivity kicks in and we all become, as Augustine puts it in his Confessions, "questions unto ourselves". Being human means experiencing that-while our actions are earnest attempts of responding to these questions, final answers remain out of reach, and we find
Sufferings, theodicies, disciplinary practices, appropriations
International Social Science Journal, 1997
How to render suffering meaningful remains a formidable task for social anthropology and sociology. This stems in part from the fact that a society must, to some extent, hide from itself how much suffering is imposed upon individ-uals as a price of belonging; and the social ...
The World According to Suffering
The Philosophy of Suffering, 2019
On the face of it, suffering from the loss of a loved one and suffering from intense pain are very different things. What makes them both experiences of suffering? I argue it’s neither their unpleasantness nor the fact that we desire not to have such experiences. Rather, what we suffer from negatively transforms the way our situation as a whole appears to us. To cash this out, I introduce the notion of negative affective construal, which involves practically perceiving our situation as calling for change, registering this perception with a felt desire for change, and believing that the change is not within our power. We (attitudinally) suffer when negative affective construal is pervasive, either because it colours a large swath of possibilities, as in the case of anxiety, or because it narrows our attention to what hurts, as in the case of grief. On this view, sensory or bodily suffering is a special case of attitudinal suffering: the unpleasantness of pain causes pervasive negative affective construal. Pain that doesn’t negatively transform our world doesn’t make for suffering.
Suffering, justice, and the politics of becoming
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 1996
organize suffering into categories to help cope with it, but often these categories themselves conceal some forms of suffering, even contribute to them. This latter experience leads some to suspect that suffering is never entirely reducible to any determinate set of categories. To suffer is to bear, endure or undergo, to submit to something injurious, to become disoraanized. Suffering subsists on the underside of agency, mastery, wholeness, joy, and comfort. It is, therefore, ubiquitous. But there I go.., moving from the agony of suffering to a comforting reflection on it. Appropriating suffering to a reading of the human condition. For severe suffering exceeds every interpretation of it while persistently demanding interpretation. Without suffering, it is unlikely we would have much depth in our philosophies and religions. But with it, life is tough.., and miserable for many. Does the poly-cultural character of suffering reveal something about the human condition? And.how contestable and 3 culturally specific are the medical, psychological, religious, ethical, therapeutic, sociostructural, economic and political categories through which suffering is acknowledged and administered today? Is "sufferingn a porous universal, whose persistence as a cultural term reveals how conceptually discrete injuries, wounds, and agonies are experientially fungible, crossing and confounding the fragile boundaries we construct between them? Or is it a barren generality, seducing theorists into metaphysical explorations far removed from specific injuries in need of medical or moral or religious or political or therapeutic or military attention? Any response to this question draws upon one or more of the theoretical paradigms already noted. A political theorist might focus on power struggles between disparate professionals over the legitimate definition and treatment of suffering. An evangelist might minister instances that fit the Christian model. And a physician might medicate theorists and spiritualists burned out by the projects these faiths commend. Is the bottom line, then, that today people go to the doctor when they really need help? Perhaps. But they might pray after getting the treatment. Or file a malpractice suit. Or join a political movement to redesign the health care system. Sufferers are full of surprises. Among fieid contenders for primacy in the domain of suffering, ethical theory has pretty much dropped out of the running. The reason is clear, even if astonishing. Contemporary professional paradigms of ethics, represented fairly well by John