Abstract
The logics orienting liberalism to suffering, and the ubiquitous imperatives of representation that reinforce these logics, come together in an approach toward suffering that regards it as an object to be dealt with, targeted, treated, and managed. There appears to be a disjunction between the treatment of suffering in the politics of inclusion—where the possessive individualism of injury requires sufferers to identify themselves with their injuries and enter the realm of justice on this basis to make certain exchanges and enact certain claims—and in the original position, where our admittance into the material imaginaries populating it requires casting away any identities and injuries extraneous to the public identity of an autonomous liberal subject. This disjunction belies a deeper unity, in that the relation to suffering imposed in the former is presupposed in the latter.
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Notes
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 106.
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© 2010 Asma Abbas
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Abbas, A. (2010). The Labor of Suffering. In: Liberalism and Human Suffering. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113541_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113541_5
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