Abstract
Recognizing the historical determinants of the form and content of our suffering is essential to the debate over the “right” location of suffering in politics and over the “right” legibility and, indeed, utter-ability, of the same. It is conceivable what the costs are of speaking for the others who suffer, whether to compensate or to liberate them. But when everyone speaking for oneself as such becomes the guiding principle of ethical and democratic politics, some of the issues of speech and subjectivity are rendered ahistorical and are thus ill-addressed. This confers a particular value to speech and self-presentation, and also domesticates and tokenizes those who, along with their wounds, make it to the table. This inclusion has a method, whether intentional or not, of isolating, excluding, and privileging. This happens when new maps are drawn and when a self-aggrandizing multiculturalism neuters and evacuates the politics of class, race, and gender. This also happens when philanthropic commitments render others visible in a way that makes even the master-slave dialectic seem optimistic; when our care constructs its objects monologically and only the speech that responds to us counts as speech; or when others serve as faithful illustrations of our moral conundrums or successes.
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Notes
Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (New York: Theater Communications Group, 1995), 266–67.
Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum (New York: Vintage, 1990);
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© 2010 Asma Abbas
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Abbas, A. (2010). The Liberal Sensorium. In: Liberalism and Human Suffering. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113541_4
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