Pathei mathos. The Political-Cognitive Value of Suffering

The main point of this chapter is the defense of the cognitive character of suffering: suffering reveals something, a limit, or a violence, and the knowledge involved in it is important for the physical and ethical survival of the individual. Through a discussion of the way Nietzsche and Marx conceived of suffering—as a sign of weakness or as a sign of a misrecognition, i.e. as a “biological” fact or as a “political” fact—the text aims at denouncing that “principle of coercion” on which every totalitarianism is founded, and which is surreptitiously present also in some religious conceptions of suffering. Power is actually confimed by making suffering unconscious through the anesthetization of suffering and its repression. Against what Nietzsche affimed, the forgetfulness of suffering is not a sign of the Overman, but the hidden strategy of every domination.