Suffering, justice, and the politics of becoming

To suffer is to undergo, to bear, to endure. Suffering exists on the underside of agency; it is as important to ethics as agency. The experience of suffering is never entirely captured by the ethical, political, medical and spiritual categories in which it is represented. Perhaps an engagement with suffering can open up hidden connections between these domains. After examining John Caputo and Friedrich Nietzsche comparatively on the relation between suffering and ethics, this essay explores the relation of the politics of becoming to suffering. The politics of becoming is a paradoxical process by which a new cultural identity is drawn into being and yet is irreducible to the energies and motives that spurred its initiators to action. To exemplify and think the politics of becoming is to call into question the sufficiency of existing paradigms of morality. A critical examination of the Rawlsian model of justice brings out, for example, the insufficiency of justice to the politics of becoming. It suggests the need, first, to pursue an ethics of engagement between several parties drawing upon a variety of sources of ethical inspiration and, second, to cultivate ldcritical responsiveness to new social movements that struggle to place new identities onto the cultural register. If the latter movements sometimes modify general understandings of suffering, identity, justice and medical practice they also indicate the role cultural thinkers can play in re-examining periodically established codes of interaction between these domains.A paper presented, with commentaries, as the 1995 Roger Allan Moore Lecture at Harvard Medical School, Center for the Study of Culture and Medicine, May 11, 1995.