| Suffering Liberalism tells the story of the life and death of suffering in liberalism. It responds to liberalism's treatment of human suffering through the narratives of suffering at work in politics, law, art, social science, and media. Liberalism both erodes and economises individual and collective sensuousness as it is embodied in those political beings who suffer, remember and hope. It, thereby, sets the terms on how suffering matters in politics and law. Troublingly, liberalism feigns an arrogant helplessness in the face of precisely the suffering that it produces in setting these terms.; In translating human experience, liberalism yields "injury" and "victim" as core concepts of its approach to suffering. Liberal narratives determine not only how justice is done to a victims injury, but also which "victims" and "injuries" can demand liberal justice. I am particularly intrigued by how an entire philosophy that is so sensitive to the fact of human suffering shapes all of the following: how we suffer, what we suffer, and how we relate to our own and others' suffering. Liberalism understands us narrowly, as agents who experience the world only instrumentally and relate to it only productively. It is no surprise, then, that liberalism treats suffering, injustice, tragedy, memory, and hope as events that can be measured, quantified, traded, controlled and prescribed---to provide the materials for its "injury enterprise."; Liberalism embeds its approach to suffering in its political, economic, social, cultural, institutions. Suffering Liberalism explores both the possibilities and the limits of this process. It provides an alternative, materialist approach to suffering that emphasises sensuous activity, focuses on process, and thinks suffering relationally. Key to this effort is my articulation of "the labour of suffering," signalling expansive senses of labour as well as suffering in the context of the material activities of representation (in politics, ethics, law, language, art, history) that are undertaken to make suffering matter in liberalism. A historical materialism of suffering honours the many ways suffering lives, amid death, unsettling the limits liberalism places on the human capacity to struggle, remember, hope, and transform suffering. |
