Suffering and the making of politics: Perspectives from Jaspers and Camus

Abstract

Bonnie Honig has recently criticized the attempt to graft ethical and political principles onto the alleged universality of suffering. She considers this trend inhospitable to vigorous, democratic citizenship, and she pits a ‘lamentational politics’ centered on suffering and mortality against a political, agonistic humanism that focuses on life, action and courage. In this article, I inquire into how political action in concert can (and does) arise out of suffering. I characterize suffering, following Karl Jaspers, as a situation that defines being human. Yet, drawing on Jaspers and Camus, I resist its portrayal as immediately universal and anti-political. First, I transpose suffering from the plane of singular, idiosyncratic experience to that of complex situation. Second, by way of my reading of The Plague, I suggest that suffering can be privileged ground for the reconfiguration of political landscapes through its unmaking of identities in both a literal and metaphoric sense. Suffering ought not to be displaced from debates in political theory. Rather, it should become an agonistic ground of contention. It should be re-politicized.