Soteriology and Suffering

The Phenomenology, Discourse, and Politics of Salvation

Z Belinsky

American University Honors Program

Capstone

University Honors

Professor Lauren Weis, CAS (WGSS)

Professor Farhang Erfani, CAS (PHIL)

Fall, 2013-Spring, 2014 Abstract

This paper considers the common notion of religions as a response to suffering (i.e. religion as soteriology) outside of religious frameworks, bringing phenomenological, poststructuralist, and queer studies perspective to bear on the problem of how suffering is experienced, named, made an object of discourse, and incorporated into ethical and political praxis. With Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, and Blanchot, I consider how suffering is experienced and named as a problem that demands solution. Using Derrida’s notion of the proper name, especially his commentary on the poetry of Paul Celan, I consider how suffering can be translated from a singular ineffable experience to a certain name that can be located within the play and economy of discourse. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of technologies of practical reason (of domination, signification, production, and the self), I expand this framework to argue that one might consider soteriology as a certain “technology of suffering” in which suffering is discursively constituted as an object of practice. This process of objectification is itself constitutive of the subjects that are established in an instrumental relationship with suffering. I then go on to show that technologies of suffering, like all discourse, operate in a certain semantic economy that relies on the continual reinvestment of sources of suffering. As discourses have their own internal logics that legitimate their operation, technologies of suffering do not overcome and often reproduce the material conditions of suffering that they name. Their effect is to move suffering along a chain of signification that collocates it as serving a discursive function, thus overcoming its problematic nature and investing it with meaning. As such, I go on to consider, with Derrida, a certain ethical modality that involves a mode of messianic anticipation of the overcoming of suffering that is already inherent in the name of suffering outside of its location within discourses – the trace of différance in suffering is an always already (non)presence of a salvation to-come. To conclude, I consider certain acts of the AIDS activist group ACT- UP as examples of a politicization of suffering that contains elements of Derridian messianism while going beyond this framework, into that of a technology of suffering as rupture.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Professor Farhang Erfani for his guidance, criticism, and dialogue in bringing this project to completion; this project would not have been possible without him. Likewise I’d like to thank Professor Lauren Weis for her assistance in setting up the terms for this project in Fall, 2013, and in formulating the direction of this investigation. Finally, I’d like to thank Professor Jin Park, for teaching me to read Derrida like a Buddhist. Introduction

Soteriology is usually considered as a branch of traditional theological studies, with inquiries delving into the metaphysical mechanisms of the salvation of the soul, the redemption of a people, or the escape of consciousness from the cycle of rebirth in moksa or nirvana. Soteriology in this sense is tied to the doctrines of religious traditions, their conceptions of divinity and the afterlife, their assessment of the problems inherent to human life, and their proposed solutions to such problems. However, with these last two considerations—the questions of the problems of human life and how to overcome them—one can consider the response to such questions from perspectives outside of traditional theology. Religions have been noted, in both affirmative and disparaging ways and in a variety of disciplines, for their usefulness in organizing, responding to, and even mobilizing human suffering, investing such suffering with meaning and bringing it into a form of life that seeks to transcend the immediate conditions from which one suffers. Sigmund Freud famously notes the function of religions to “exorcize the terrors of nature…reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and…compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them” (Freud, 22). In more recent scholarship on religion, Stephen Prothero has proposed what I would call a “soteriological structure” as a general framework for understanding religion: “Each religion articulates: a problem; a solution to this problem, which also serves as the religious goal; [and] a technique (or techniques) for moving from this problem to this solution…” (Prothero, 14). And in Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson’s seminal critique of nationalism and the nation-state, Anderson argues: “The extraordinary survival over thousands of years of Buddhism, Christianity or Islam in dozens of different social formations attests to their imaginative response to the overwhelming burden of human suffering – disease, mutilation, grief, age, and death” (Anderson, 10). However, Anderson (unlike Freud and Prothero) is not concerned with isolating religion as the source of such “imaginative response;” indeed, it is precisely his purpose to argue that, in the absence of traditional orthodoxy, it is the “imagined community” of the nation-state that can provide such imaginative solutions to the “overwhelming burden” of suffering.

It is in light of Anderson’s suggestion that I would like to consider the problem of suffering, and “salvation” from suffering, as a genuine philosophical (and not merely religious) problem. In order to consider nationalism as fulfilling a similar role to religion, Anderson seems to hold to several premises that other intellectuals—notably Freud—do not attend to, and these premises may serve as axioms for our own inquiry, namely: it is not only the traditionally or overtly religious who suffer; response to suffering, in its diverse forms, may itself take various forms; such responses may be considered in their specificity and historicity, from a critical perspective that does not rely on any banal opposition between “rational” and “irrational.” With these axioms, we could proceed with an analysis of those cultural, political, discursive, or ideological paradigms which organize particular forms of suffering, orchestrate them within a network of meaning, and mobilize them towards particular ends. Anderson’s Imagined Communities would be a partial endeavor in this direction (given that Anderson does not make suffering his primary framework of analysis); no doubt many other projects which follow in the general direction of this inquiry, from anthropological, sociological, historical, psychoanalytical, and critical social perspectives, could be enumerated. Given the potential of these inquiries to illuminate our understanding of cultural formations we are accustomed to calling “religions”—as well as certain of those, such as nationalism, which we are not—it is worthwhile to consider what implications a philosophical inquiry into this topic might have. Specifically, if we take our question to be that of the relationship of the experience of and the response to suffering—the “soteriological” question of the problem, technique for addressing it, and the salvific goal that is aimed at—what tools might we develop or apply to analyze and interrogate this relationship? What conceptual structures might we elaborate in light of this analysis that would provide a basis for understanding ways in which suffering is articulated, invested with meaning, and located within other structures of meaning that bring it into a paradigm—discursive, ideological, ethical, political—that mobilizes it to certain ends? On what basis is this relationship established in the first place? And what can this inquiry tell us about the experience of suffering as such? In other words, if I insist on calling this relationship soteriology—despite separating it from any strictly religious context—it is because the relationship I hope to describe is richer than the dismissive notions of “alleviating suffering” or “overcoming fear (of death, etc.)” that are often attributed to religion. Rather, soteriology, in both its traditional usage and in the usage I am envisioning, denotes an intimate mediation of a certain form of life or praxis between a problem of deep existential import that one suffers from, on the one hand, and a salvific goal that transforms this problem into its sublimated form, on the other. Thus, I insist on the term soteriology, in the first place, because I argue that responses to suffering are conceptually elaborate discursive paradigms that require rigorous tools of analysis in order to understand in their function and structure. In the second place, I favor this appropriation of religious language insofar as, I hope to argue, there is something in the structure of the experience of suffering as such that invites a certain teleology, eschatology, or even messianism.

In this paper, I begin my inquiry with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche in order to articulate the general problem of the relationship between suffering and the structures of “salvation” that respond to it. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes what I call the “soteriology of the will” – how the “salvation” of the will establishes a relationship between suffering and meaning that allows the will to avoid the dangers of nihilism. In the Genealogy Nietzsche considers this relationship in terms of Christianity, slave morality, philosophy, art, and scientific atheism, thus broadening our inquiry beyond a religious scope. In each of these paradigms, an experience of suffering, or “senseless” suffering, is named or articulated in a particular way (such as “guilt” in Christianity) in order to give it “sense” that establishes it in a certain economy of meaning; this naming itself entails certain positive and negative features – positive transformation in terms of the will’s ability to appropriate, and a negation or turning away from that which the will cannot appropriate. From here, I explore this theme of “turning away” through the thought of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, and Emmanuel Levinas. For Heidegger there is an originary experience of suffering—anxiety in the face of death (Being-towards-death)—that is foundational to all suffering that is articulated within the province of the ‘they’ (Das Man). Blanchot and Levinas share the notion of an ineffable foundation—articulated variously as “the night,” “the other” (l’Autre) and “the disaster” by Blanchot, and the ‘there is’ (il y a) by Levinas—that one must “turn away” from in order to imbue it with positive and effable features. What will be named as “suffering” cannot, before the inauguration of the name which brings it into linguistic community, be thought of as suffering as such; there is something in the singularity of this experience which is “written over” in its very naming as suffering (which, recalling Nietzsche, itself has many names – guilt, fear of death, ascetic self- laceration, etc.).

In consideration of this theme, I turn to the thought of Jacques Derrida on the name, the act of linguistic application which is itself a division that brings the singularity or event of suffering into a general economy of meaning. It is in this context—after the application of the name which makes it available in its difference (“play”) to the grasping and mobilization by a discourse (“economy”)—that I consider suffering-made-object in terms of the thought of Michel Foucault, specifically his technologies of practical reason. Foucault articulates these technologies as forms of discursive practice by which a certain form of subjectivity is constituted through the operation of a particular object that is likewise discursively constituted. I argue that we can consider a certain “technology of suffering” as a form of subjectivity which transforms the subject’s relation to suffering by locating it within a chain of signification that connects it to a certain discursive goal. While this goal serves as the “meaning” of suffering that significantly reduces the existential peril that the experience of suffering as such threatens, this transformation does not aim at the elimination of suffering. Rather, the discursive movement towards the goal itself relies on the discursive (re)constitution of suffering in a manner in which the dialectic of suffering-goal continually renews itself. As such, the very conditions which invest suffering with meaning preclude any “final deliverance” from suffering. In contrast to this economy of suffering—a kind of soteriology which, like all economy, relies on the continual re-investment of discursive capital in new sources of both meaning and suffering—I return to the thought of Blanchot and Derrida in order to consider the possibility of maintaining “suffering” before it is named as such, in its radical ambiguity. In this context, rather than constituting one’s subjectivity against suffering which is objectified as a function of discourse, the singularity of “suffering” dissolves subjectivity itself. It is this digging up of the “tomb” of suffering which is a certain ethical modality that constitutes an impossible possibility of final deliverance from suffering – as Derrida puts it, from archaeology to eschatology, from the silence of the tomb to the coming of the messiah.

Nietzsche’s Soteriology of the Will

But all this notwithstanding—man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was henceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense—the ‘sense-less’—he could now will something; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved.

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Aphorism 28

Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals could be considered a treatise on the soteriology of the will that aims to identify and criticize historical responses to suffering, and identify the ways in which these responses give form to suffering that provides the driving force for the will. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche argues that giving meaning to suffering is the fundamental problem for the salvation of the will, insofar as “[man’s] problem was not suffering itself, but that there was no answer to the crying question, ‘why do I suffer?” (GM III 28). “What really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering” (GM II 7), and it is this senselessness which places a demand on the will to give suffering a name, a meaning, and to identify this meaning with a form of life, a disciplina voluntatis (GS 353) that makes suffering tolerable. It is this kind of suffering invested with meaning that humanity “does not repudiate…as such,” but “desires it, even seeks it out” (GM III 28). Suffering, insofar as it weighs upon the will in its senselessness, creates the conditions for the will to seek out new ideals, goals, and valuations: “Woe entreats: Go! Away, woe! But all that suffers wants to live, that it may become ripe and joyous and longing—longing for what is farther, higher, brighter” (Z “The Drunken Song” 9). Thus the experience of suffering is tied intimately to a drive for ideals and goals – in this sense suffering could be said to contain an implicit teleological drive.

To give a name to suffering is to imbue it with positive, articulable features. However, what does it mean to suffer, and what is this naming, for Nietzsche? In the Genealogy he discusses how “hidden, undetected, unwitnessed suffering” is “abolished” with the invention gods, demons, and the like (GM II 7); in other words, to give a name to senseless suffering is to identify it as the function of a certain will, even the will of the gods. And, as we know from Nietzsche’s critique of slave morality, any will which cannot overtake another, stronger will, finds some sideways and hidden means to do so, for “[w]hoever does not know how to lay his will into things, at least lays some meaning into them” (TI “Maxims and Arrows” 18). This is especially useful insofar as it writes over the conflicts within oneself that one suffers from and identifies them with an outside force – a process similar to Freud’s sense of projection:

When I think of the craving to do something, which continually tickles and spurs those millions of young Europeans who cannot endure their boredom and themselves, then I realize that they must have a craving to suffer and to find in their suffering a probable reason for action, for deeds…These young people demand that—not happiness but unhappiness should approach from the outside and become visible; and their imagination is busy in advance to turn it into a monster so that afterward they can fight a monster (GS 56).

We can readily see this in Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground, in which the protagonist is riddled with vague, multiple and daily internal sufferings, but finds relief in a petty crusade to confront an officer who insulted him. Of course, he suffers in scheming and striving to execute this confrontation, but having this singular opposition provides him with relief and purpose for months; after his triumph and brief elation, he is plagued with a horrible nausea and guilt at no longer having his monster to fight—he is brought back into the senselessness of his own nameless suffering.

For Nietzsche the soteriology of the will (as I am calling it) has a positive character– to provide suffering with a name and meaning that identifies it with a particular goal and means to achieve it.1 The will seeks to make suffering “become visible;” however, this visibility is accomplished by excluding other possibilities, subsuming diverse sources of suffering under one rubric, and by ignoring other sources altogether, which are left unspoken and “invisible.” Nietzsche describes these positive and negative functions as the “fundamental will of the spirit”: positively, the will creates “simplicity out of multiplicity, it is a binding, subduing, domineering and truly masterful will”; on the other hand, “[t]his same will is served by an apparently opposite drive of spirit, a suddenly emerging resolution in favor of ignorance and arbitrary termination, a closing of its windows, an inner nay-saying to something or other, a come-no-closer, a type of defensive state against many knowable things, a contentment with darkness, with closing horizons… all of which are necessary in proportion to the degree of its appropriating force” (BGE 230). Thus, one and the same expression of the will is both a positive constitution of its object and a negative “covering over” and repulsion of the multiple, the different, and the outside. Even the will which does not aim to subordinate, master, or destroy still contains a minimal feature of negation: thus Nietzsche exclaims, “Let looking away be my only negation!” (GS 276) – even the life-affirmative stance which refuses to say no still requires a certain looking over or ignoring, a moment in which “forgetting and passing by are the best wisdom” (Z “On Passing By”). Thus, we may— recalling Heidegger’s characterization of the will to power in Volume 1 of Nietzsche—consider the will as something which brings certain things, such as suffering, positively to light only by a certain act of writing over, re-coloring with new meaning, and framing – much like the work of an artist. Nietzsche

1 Consider, for example, the conjunction of sin-guilt-redemption as articulated by St. Paul; or the articulation of the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism: suffering exists, suffering arises, suffering passes away, the way to suffering’s cessation is the Eightfold Path. In these religious doctrines, articulation of the first term or problem already implies a series of relationships that necessitates the solution. himself recommends art as a way of dealing with the suffering of life, for “[a]s an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us” (GS 107):

Moving away from things until there is a good deal that one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we are still to see them at all; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and framed; or to place them so that they partially conceal each other and grant us only glimpses of architectural perspectives; or looking at them through tinted glass or in the light of the sunset; or giving them a surface and skin that is not fully transparent—all this we should learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other matters. For with them this subtle power usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but we want to be the poets of our life… (GS 299). It is in light of this artistic gesture that I argue that for Nietzsche, “looking away” or the “closing of windows” of the will is no mere negative gesture but rather the very grounds on which the will is able to positively articulate suffering in a way that can be appropriated, orchestrated in a system of values, and mobilized towards a soteriological goal. For “senseless” suffering to be a driving force for the will, it must be invested with meaning – a meaning that forecloses its “hidden, undetected, unwitnessed” character and allows it to be articulated as a problem, a problem that already implies and anticipates a solution. I move now to my next section, in which I consider this theme of “looking away” articulated as a kind of art through the writings of Blanchot on literature. “Looking Away” and suffering in Heidegger, Levinas, and Blanchot

‘Have you suffered for knowledge’s sake?’ This is asked of us by Nietzsche, on the condition that we not misunderstand the word ‘suffering’: it means, not so much what we undergo, as that which goes under. It denotes the pas [“not”] of the utterly passive, withdrawn from all sight, from all knowing.

Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 3

[A]n action is an inscription in being.

Levinas, Existence and Existents, p. 27 In this section I take the theme of “looking away” inherited from Nietzsche and explore it through a syzygial constellation of the thought of Heidegger, Levinas, and Blanchot in order to divine from this alignment—and the space between them—the positive dimension of bringing suffering to light that corresponds to this apparently negative gesture. By this I mean something precise: by aligning these three thinkers along an axis that moves from our common understanding of suffering to that suffering which is “withdrawn from all sight, from all knowing,” it is my hope that we will be able to have a vision of how suffering is first articulated as a problem that demands solution. In other words, if we are to follow Nietzsche in not considering suffering to be inherently problematic, if there are certain conditions under which one even seeks out suffering, then suffering cannot be considered a problem merely by virtue of its being “unpleasant”. Rather, we must consider the conditions under which suffering can be known as a problem, as an object of knowledge that demands a solution. Following the analogy with art put forward with Nietzsche in the previous section, if “literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question” (Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death, 1995a, 300), then soteriology could be said to being when suffering becomes a question, when it first becomes positively articulated as a question that can be an object of knowledge. Salvation begins when one first encounters the need to be saved; one must consider this beginning carefully. For Nietzsche, the will erases as it produces, it looks away as it gives form artistically to its object. Likewise, for Blanchot “The work disappears, but the fact of disappearing remains and appears as the essential thing, the movement which allows the work to be realized as it enters the stream of history, to be realized as it disappears” (307-308). In order for suffering to be known, to be brought into sight, into history, there must be something of suffering that disappears, that is forgotten, that one cannot know. How does this occur? Let us consider how, phenomenologically, anything in general can be constituted as an object of knowledge. For the sake of precision, perhaps it is best to begin with Heidegger in this inquiry. Heidegger articulates a basis for this forgetting that grounds all suffering as a problem, a problem that can be calculated about to the consideration of possible solutions. This basis is Dasein’s fall from authenticity, its “fleeing in the face of itself,” in which it forgets its basic character as Being-towards- death (Heidegger, 230). “The turning-away of falling is grounded…in anxiety, which in turn is what first makes fear possible” (ibid., emphasis original). Anxiety in the face of Being-in-the-world as Being- towards-death is the foundation for all fear as we commonly understand it; Dasein’s “turning-away” is “precisely to turn thither towards entities within-the-world by absorbing itself in them” (ibid.). To turn towards entities within-the-world is to “discover” them, to have them present- and ready-to-hand, in other words, as instrumental objects. Thus, to bring suffering to light as an object of apprehension is to forget a more foundational sense of anxiety, according to Heidegger, “by looking circumspectively away [sic] from the possible and looking at that for which it is possible” (305, last emphasis mine). Instead of considering suffering (or anxiety, for Heidegger) as something that as a radically singular event takes hold of us in our being, we make it a problem, we ask “What for?”,2 and in doing so “we weaken it by calculating how we are to have it at our disposal” (305-306). We consider what it is possible for, in other words, for what end, for what goal, instead of interrogating it in its radical possibility in itself.

It is here in the consideration of possibility in itself that we must ask with Levinas and Blanchot, is not conceiving of the “possible for” something a departure from the impossibility (of death, suffering, knowledge, etc.), rather than its possibility? Let us turn briefly to Heidegger’s remarks in the Anaximander Fragment in order to consider more clearly the moment of division in which the “possible for” separates itself from the more primordial (im)possibility. For Heidegger, the “forgetting of Being” that we have been discussing variously as “looking away,” “disappearance,” etc., is a “genesis,” a “dawn” in which “presence becomes itself present” (Derrida, 1973, 155). The essence of presence is to be different from the present, but “[t]he forgetting [of the difference between Being and beings, between presence and the present] is so essentially to the destination of Being that the dawn of this destination begins precisely as an unconcealment of the present in its presence” (156). Thus forgetting is unconcealment, to turn away is to discover and make manifest, to make visible (as in Nietzsche, above). All of these metaphors of sight, light, and the dawn of the Being of beings are all to be extremely important as we depart from Heidegger. What Heidegger describes as “the matinal trace” (die frühe Spur) (ibid.) of the difference between Being and beings, the trace or mark of this distance that disappears in Being’s manifestation as the Being of beings, is not the dawn of the present (qua the manifestation of beings-in-the-world, the “discovering” of beings to Dasein’s horizon of apprehension) that covers over Being as presence. On the contrary, for Levinas, this Being which is covered over by the dawn of beings and the light of intelligibility is rather existence purged of all existents, Being without beings, the night, the there is (il y a) as the “anonymous rumbling of existence” (Levinas, 1978, 34) that is better understood as the presence of absence (58) than as a pure presence. The anxious experience of being brought face-to-face with one’s Being is not Dasein’s return home to itself, in which Dasein is authentically brought back to itself in an open circle of disclosure (Being as Being-toward-the-future and Being-towards-death); rather, the circle of subjectivity is dissolved entirely in the face of the night (for

2 Recall that for Nietzsche, the question that plagues humanity is “Why do I suffer?” i.e. for what reason, for what purpose? Levinas, of course, this expression of speech remains quite literal: to be face-to-face with the night is to experience the face of the Other). The phenomenological experience before the dawn of intelligibility3 undermines the phenomenological horizon over which the matinal rays of beings first appear – no subject-object dualism can attain, nothing can become an object of instrumental knowledge, and no subject is able to ask, with Nietzsche’s ascetic man, “Why do I suffer?” Thus, in Levinas’ formulation of the night or the there is, we have a conception of what it means for suffering to be “withdrawn from all sight, from all knowing” (Blanchot, above).

Thus far we have established an understanding of how “looking away” can belong to a positive process of producing or manifesting objects of knowledge or apprehension—one looks away from the source of objects in Being (however conceived) and absorbs oneself in the objects themselves, which allows us to have them ready-at-hand, to make them instruments of our will and action. The dawn of apprehension is foundational to our activity among beings-in-the-world; in order to act, our will must constitute itself against a certain object, and bring that object to light—object and subject are manifest in the same process. In soteriological terms, we phenomenologically apprehend suffering as an object that demands action and solution – we know it as a problem, and this problem becomes a direction for the will to act. We distinguish it from existence in general, we isolate it as a singular object of consideration in order that we may absorb ourselves in it and act upon it. As Levinas aptly puts it, “To act is an inscription in being.” This notion of “inscription” by which a being is marked out in a space within anonymous existence and given intelligibility parallels the Nietzschean notion of the will’s appropriation via art. To continue with this theme of artistic inscription, I turn now to Maurice Blanchot’s conception of literature.

In “Literature and the Right to Death,” Blanchot formulates a notion of literature that parallels the phenomenological formulation of “looking away” in terms of language and signification. Blanchot’s reasons for elevating writing or literature over other phenomenological considerations are because it mirrors and epitomizes the phenomenological structure discussed above by which subject and object together are constituted (an “inscription”) within existence in general: “If we see work as the force of history, the force that transforms man while it transforms the world, then a writer’s activity must be recognized as the highest form of work” (Blanchot, 313).4 Writing, literature, and language in general become activities which bring about certain consequences in the world, and which constitute the subject’s appropriative relationship to them: “When we speak, we gain control over things with satisfying ease. I say, ‘This woman,’ and she is immediately available to me, I push her away, I bring her close, she is everything I want her to be, she becomes the place in which the most surprising sorts of transformations occur and actions unfold: speech is life’s ease and security. We cannot do anything with an object that has no name” (Blanchot, 322). This notion of the security and ease brought about by speech mirrors closely Heidegger’s comment that we weaken anxiety in the face of death by “calculating” about it—by turning towards (Heidegger) or naming (Blanchot) beings-in-the-world, I establish myself in relation to them, hold them at a certain distance or closeness, and enact transformations within them, all of which is made possible simply by this turning towards or naming. In

3 This “before” being not a temporal priority but an analytical one, if one can say as much about an experience that defies analysis. 4 I will return to this dual constitution of subject-object in terms of Foucault’s notion of technologies of practical reason, below. other words, the name presupposes calculation and control, and conversely, we cannot control anything that has no name. This is our fundamental relationship to beings-in-the-world: “The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being” (322) – in other words, deprived of its anonymous existence in the night, before knowledge can attain. By looking away from this anonymous existence where knowledge, death, suffering, etc. are impossible, I bring the thing to light, I know suffering as a problem, as a question, and thereby have already begun the soteriological process of transforming it and investing it with meaning.

Simon Critchley’s discussion of Blanchot’s conception of the Myth of Orpheus provides a neat summation of the themes we have been considering in this section of looking away and the bringing suffering into the light of apprehension/knowledge. The gods’ rule that Orpheus refrain from looking at Eurydice—representing in her beauty, for Blanchot, the work of art, a work that will take on a very different tone in our discussion of suffering—constitutes a certain law of production that depends on a certain renouncing of her beauty that must remain invisible. To make her beauty visible, her invisible beauty must be renounced.

[T]he presentation or unconcealment of the beautiful form in the daylight – what one can call, with Heidegger, ‘world’ – can only be achieved by submitting to the prohibition against looking Eurydice in the face, by recognizing that she can only be approached by turning away. That is to say, there is a law of concealment, the dark ascent out of Hades, which is necessary to the production of the work – we might think of this concealment as ‘earth’ for Heidegger, the nocturnal material substratum of the artwork. Thus the law that governs the production of the artwork depends on an obedience to the creative strife of world and earth, of unconcealment and concealment: aletheia. (Critchley, 42)

Thus, we finally end with the arrival of the word or name in the light (of knowledge, history, apprehension), an arrival predicated on the abandonment of something invisible, something lost – the word or artwork arrives deprived of its being. This arrival might seem like something other than what we have been hoping to divine from our investigation – we might even sense a certain false messianism in this arrival. Indeed, it is precisely the problem of the artist that she “does not want to make the invisible visible, but rather (and impossibly) to see the invisible as invisible” (43), thus causing Orpheus to break the law of the gods and turn back towards Eurydice. However, we must consider carefully what this strife of aletheia means if appropriated to a specifically soteriological structure. What we have been discussing is how suffering becomes articulated as a problem, as an object of knowledge that demands solution, that aims towards a higher state. Blanchot argues forcefully and poignantly that

when I say ‘This woman,’ real death has been announced and is already present in my language; my language means that this person, who is here right now, can be detached from herself, removed from her existence and her presence, and suddenly plunged into a nothingness in which there is no existence or presence; my language essentially signifies the possibility of this destruction; it is a constant, bold allusion to such an event…if this woman were not really capable of dying, if she were not threatened by death at every moment of her life, bound and joined to the death by an essential bond, I would not be able to carry out that ideal negation, that deferred assassination which is what my language is. Therefore it is accurate to say that when I speak, death speaks in me. (Blanchot, 1995a, 323)

Beautiful as this passage is, can we not identify a complete reversal of tone, of implications, indeed of a certain ethical modality when it is the question of suffering and not a woman who is named? The announcement of the death of suffering in its very naming is a completely different ethical experience than the announcement of death of that which is most precious and singular to me (an artwork or my beloved). Indeed, if I may say so quite provocatively and in a manner which bears extensive further commentary, it is precisely insofar as “when I speak, death speaks in me” that when I speak about suffering it is salvation that has already been announced and is present in my language – language is, at least in this case, a certain soteriology.

Archaeology and Eschatology of Suffering

The first effect or first destination of language therefore involves depriving me of, or delivering me from, my singularity.

Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 60

...it is the ciphered mark that one must be able to partake of with the other, and this differential capability must be inscribed in oneself, that is, in one’s own body as much as in the body of one’s own language, the one to the same extent as the other. This inscription of difference in the body (e.g. the phonatory aptitude to pronounce this or that) is, nonetheless, not natural; it is in no way an innate, organic faculty. Its very origin presupposes belonging to a cultural and linguistic community, to a milieu of apprenticeship, in sum, an alliance.

Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, p. 26

There is something singular about the experience of suffering, something incommunicable that individualizes. No one can suffer for me; yet in suffering I desire to articulate my suffering to others, to translate this singular experience into a general one so that others can know and experience it for themselves. “Suffering is suffering when one can no longer suffer it, and when, because of this non- power, one cannot cease suffering it. A singular sensation…The present of suffering is the abyss of the present, indefinitely hollowed out and in this hollowing indefinitely distended, radically alien to the possibility that one might be present to it through the mastery of presence” (Blanchot, 1993, 44). Suffering resists the objectification of language, it refuses to be named, and yet we cannot suffer it (alone). We are overwhelmed by the present or singularity of suffering, so much so that we are deprived of presence – we are in the night, in the hollow of Being. And yet we desire to articulate suffering, to make it knowable; this desire parallels the desire of the writer who desires to translate “the pure night of his own possibilities” into a concrete work (Blanchot, 1995a, 307). When the author writes a sentence, “it is not just his sentence, but a sentence that belongs to other people, people who can read it – it is a universal sentence” (305-306). When this happens, the interest of others “changes the work, transforms it into something different, something in which he does not recognize the original perfection” (306). As such, the desire of the writer to communicate her own singularity produces something other than that singularity. Have we not experienced this? We describe our suffering to another, articulate it to them, and they share their empathy – but our suffering sounds strange in their mouths. It is no long our suffering, it has been renegotiated and restaged in new relationships, it does not carry the weight of absolute abjection of the present. It has been abstracted from us and we no longer experience its absolute proximity and strangeness, it is now simultaneously familiar and distant to us. Our uniqueness, our loneliness as a sufferer is understood, but in doing so it is no longer loneliness. To make sense of this experience, I turn to Derrida’s discussion of the poetry of Paul Celan, and his notion of the “experience of the date” that informs our discussion of the naming of suffering. In “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” Derrida describes the poem as “the whole logic of individuation”: “The poem is ‘the language of an individual who has taken on form’ (‘gestaltgewordene Sprache eines Einzelnen’). Singularity, but also solitude: the only one, the poem is alone (einsam). And from within the most intimate essence of its solitude, it is underway (unterwegs), ‘aspiring to a presence’…” (Derrida, 2005, 5). Because of this being underway, of already aspiring to something beyond itself, to a presence, Derrida locates the poem within the “secret of encounter” (ibid.). Both poetry and suffering are a certain singularity, but a singularity that invites or beckons something beyond itself. As Paul Celan puts it, “No one/ bears witness for the/ witness” (32); and yet that is impossibly what we attempt to do when we articulate suffering or write a poem. In order to understand this, we must understand how the poem itself is both marked and made possible by a date. In the date, “Several singular events may be conjoined, allied, concentrated” in a “tomb, closed over the event that it marks” (10). This tomb represents the death of the singularity, the depravation of the being that is articulated in a date, sign, or word, from its Being (as in Blanchot, above). By dating an event, I identify the event as a singular one, one that cannot happen again except on this date. And yet a date is not the event itself; rather it is that which makes articulation of the event possible: “the date, by its mere occurrence, by the inscription of a sign ‘as a memorandum,’ will have broken the silence of pure singularity. But to speak of it one must also efface it, make it readable, audible, intelligible beyond the singularity of which it speaks” (9). The event dies in the date, it is entombed in it. However, this death is that which makes the poem possible:

Instead of walling up the poem and reducing it to the silence of a singularity, a date gives it its chance, the chance to speak to the other! …[The poem] absolves itself of the date so that its utterance may resonate clamor beyond a singularity that might otherwise remain undecipherable, mute, and immured in its date – in the unrepeatable. (8-9)

Derrida speaks again of this “clamor” of the poem later as it “wresting itself or subtracting itself from itself, from its immediate adherence, from the here and now, by freeing itself from what it nonetheless remains, a date” (15). The imagery of clamor, of wresting oneself from one’s singularity and the “here and now” which is poetically given new form, suggests the Biblical image of Jacob wrestling with the angel and becoming Israel. A man is called Jacob, he is named and brought into the world, but his name names only him. In order to be transmuted into a generality, into the “universal sentence” that Blanchot speaks of, he must wrest himself from his singularity and become Israel, the name of a people. The date of this self-overcoming is a date which represents dating in general, a date which anticipates all dates and, especially, the last date of the age of the Messiah– from the tomb of the date to the resurrection, “archaeology and eschatology” (2).

At this point, we are speaking of metaphors of metaphors. It is especially difficult to parse these metaphors given that Derrida is often, here and elsewhere, speaking in at least two modes: in the first place, he identifies the “experience of the date” as “experience itself” (9) and notes that “a date functions like a proper name” (16), that the “destiny of a date is analogous to that of every name, of every proper name” (40). In this sense, Derrida is speaking of our phenomenological experience through the operation of language. In the second place, Derrida is concerned with the poem as the opening up to the other, the “secret of encounter” that is the logic that operates within the poem. In this sense, he is speaking in ethical terms. Derrida is increasingly averse to separating these two modes; Blanchot’s discussion of literature poses similar analytical problems. Let us for now put aside the question of ethics—a question to which I will faithfully return, with Derrida and Blanchot, in the second half of my paper—and focus on the metaphors at hand as they clarify the operation of language in general. Let us also put aside the question of who is writing the poem, and what date marks the poem, and consider instead their implications as general operations of language.

The date, like a proper name, identifies what is singular and unique, but in so doing it makes it repeatable. Anyone can speak my name, but it (supposedly) represents only me. The date likewise represents a singular event, but in a way that is repeatable in the act of memorializing, in the anniversary which always comes and is always to-come. Derrida speaks of this function of the date as “destining oneself to the date as to the other, the date past as well as the date promised” (8) – archaeology to eschatology. Though it may appear we have already fallen back into the ethical, considered from a linguistic point of view these metaphors describe the function of language in the most general terms – the play of sameness (repetition) and difference (the other). The date or proper name inscribes the singularity of the event in a linguistic form that is repeatable, but in its repetition it is opened beyond itself, “becomes both the same and an other, wholly other as the same, capable of speaking to the other of the other, to the one who cannot decipher such an absolutely closed date, a tomb, closed over the event that it marks” (10). This logic of opening is the poem that “absolves itself” of the date in order to “clamor” and “resonate” beyond itself. This palimpsestic process of language— the event written over in the date, the date written over in the poem, the poem and date written over by their repetition and repetition itself departing into difference—is the very process which makes the singularity of experience available to discourse. From the play of language to the economy of discourse, the minute we name something we make it available for restaging, for substitution within a series of relationships, for localization within a system of value that gives the name meaning beyond itself. The name beckons or invites this restaging insofar as it is already located in the play of differences. In effect, the name already contains its own difference, and hence, its own exhaustion, its last repetition, its eschaton. It is able to be invested with meanings beyond itself – internal to sin is redemption, internal to guilt is forgiveness, internal to death is resurrection…within the discourses which name suffering as such, which take up the name of suffering in a particular way. This taking up is the process of salvation that brings suffering beyond itself, invests it with meaning, and as such overcomes it.

A sentence is a “universal sentence;” a name is already a universal name as soon as we name it as such. This is because the name presupposes the logic of the play of sameness and difference, of différance, that is proper to language in general. However, in the economy of discourses, the play of the name is not so ecumenical – discourses are always partisan. As such, I want to return to the second quote that opened this section, and—venturing the risk of one final metaphor—the notion of the poem as a shibboleth. For Derrida, the “date itself resembles a shibboleth. It gives ciphered access to this collocation, to this secret configuration of places for memory” (24). It is a particular utterance that presupposes privileged identification with a particular knowledge and with a particular group. The shibboleth is a way of producing particular knowledge, and a way of locating oneself within a certain economy of relationships. Its “very origin presupposes belonging to a cultural and linguistic community, to a milieu of apprenticeship, in sum, an alliance” (26). Thus, to call suffering a shibboleth, as I now claim to do, is to say that naming suffering in a particular way (i.e. with a certain accent, as in the mythology of the Hebrew word itself) guarantees a certain subjective alignment that produces certain knowledge of oneself, one’s suffering, and those with whom one suffers. To name suffering is to collectivize suffering. Thus, the shibboleth of suffering is an interpellative act of naming that has a history, internal logic, and above all instrumental ends – in other words, a technology of suffering.

Technologies of Suffering and the Economy of Discourse

If in closing my previous section I have appeared as moving too quickly—from the singularity of suffering to a discourse which represents collectivity and historicity—I have done so with the awareness that this is precisely how discourse functions. As much as Derrida would prefer to maintain the paradoxes of the name as both singularity and différance, when we attempt to do so we find that discourse is already present and doing its work. The name that opens itself up to difference and play makes itself available to a certain linguistic economy: it is collocated within a series of hierarchies, relationships, values, and significations that draw associations, make judgments, appropriate and consolidate linguistic resources, and deploy them to particular ends. The operation of this economy, our location and interpellation within it, produces certain effects on our subjective orientation towards the object we have now named. Further, it produces our subjectivity itself, through the operation of this economy of discourse on the object discursively produces – suffering, given a name and understood as a problem, as the object of a certain process of inquiry and manipulation. We can better understand the operation of this economy through the work of Michel Foucault, whose notion of “technologies of practical reason” is useful here.

Foucault’s reflection on his work in the lectures and interviews collected in the 1997 Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth gives a general perspective on his project that is a good starting point of a discussion of the operations of technology and discourse. Foucault cites Jürgen Habermas, noting that “one can distinguish three major types of technique: the techniques that permit one to produce, to transform, to manipulate things; the techniques that permit one to use sign systems; and finally, the techniques that permit one to determine the conduct of individuals, to impose certain ends or objectives. That is to say, techniques of production, techniques of signification or communication, and techniques of domination” (Foucault, 1997, 177). Foucault in his later work aims to expand this repertoire of techniques to include techniques of the self. He formulates this repertoire elsewhere as such:

we must understand that there are four major types of these ‘technologies,’ each a matrix of practical reason: (1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (225)

Foucault goes on to cite Marx as an example of how each of these technologies of “practical reason” “implies certain modes of training and modification of individuals, not only in the obvious sense of acquiring certain skills but also in the sense of acquiring certain attitudes” (ibid.). He notes that “the relation between manipulating things and domination appears clearly in Karl Marx’s Capital, where every technique of production requires modification of individual conduct—not only skills but also attitudes” (ibid.). Thus, we see how these technologies of practical reason which allow us to manipulate certain objects have a twofold effect: in the first place, the object is discursively constituted and invested with meaning, as Foucault’s work on madness, biopolitics, etc. has shown; in the second place, the individual through whom the technology operates is similarly constituted, acquires a certain orientation in order to establish the relationship with the object, and takes on certain subjective states such as attitudes and skills with respect to the object.

It might appear that Foucault’s technologies of the self most nearly resembles the soteriological structure we have been considering, given that the states of “purity, wisdom, happiness, perfection or immortality” resemble the specifically religious notions of soteriologies that focus on the metaphysical soul, etc. However, I want to argue that this general framework of technologies of practical reason offers a way to theorize the question we began with, namely, how is a relationship with suffering established? How is it made an object of knowledge and known as a problem? How is it collocated within a series of relationships that invest it with meaning facilitate its transformation? Foucault’s repertoire, I argue, is not a limited toolkit but a general framework for understanding how discursive practices constitute certain objects. With Nietzsche, they help to explain how suffering can be an object of the will, how they incite us to action as a problem that demands solution. These technologies explain Heidegger’s comment about how we weaken anxiety in the face of death by “calculating” about it, and this technological accounting brings the object in question into the sphere of instrumental ends – we consider it as possible for something.

To offer an example of how Foucault’s framework of technologies of practical reason might be expanded, I turn to Foucault’s own theorization of S&M as “the eroticization of strategic relations” (169). Foucault theorizes the goal of S&M as the creation of new pleasure, the “desexualization of pleasure,” and the re-localization of pleasure (165). It is through the transformation of pleasure as an object of one’s action—from pain to pleasure, from sexual to non-sexual, from localized to diffuse—that the subject’s relationality and subjectivity are established. As such, I argue that Foucault’s theorization of S&M could be considered a “technology of pleasure,” by which pleasure is produced as an object of practice and action, is made the subject of transformations and manipulations in terms of “strategic relations,” and is re-localized on the body. As a subject employs a technology of pleasure, her relationship to it is altered and as such her subjective orientation is itself altered. Thus, Foucault theorizes S&M as a kind of technology of pleasure, as I call it, which is able to be deployed in order to play with identity and strategic relations.

If it is possible to expand Foucault’s framework in such a way, then I argue that a “technology of suffering” could likewise be considered as a “matrix of practical reason” in which subject and object are produced and in which the object of suffering is manipulated by certain actions that carry discursive investments. An economy of discourse is at work in this technology that locates its object within a chain of significations and a series of relationships that give suffering meaning, that in the first place produce it as a problem, a “what for?”, and then bring a system of values and knowledge production to bear on this problem. Technologies of suffering bring about a certain distance that functions as a deliverance from the singularity of our experience of suffering—suffering is now ready-to-hand as an object of manipulation. I am able to calculate about it and work with it; it becomes one object among others instead of that which totalizes my experience and defies objectification. The operation of technologies of suffering will of course be as diverse as the forms that suffering takes, from rather simple and mundane responses to suffering to elaborate forms of discursive practices, such as psychiatry, which aims to give a name to say, mental anguish, produce certain knowledge about it and calculate about how to alleviate it. The point is not to identify entire institutions such as medicine or psychiatry, or even religion, as merely the function of technologies of suffering as a totalizing category. Rather, the point is to identify those particular practices that have the discursive effect of producing suffering—however conceived—as an object of knowledge. What we can observe is how technologies of suffering produce a certain mode of subjectivity with respect to the particular knowledge one produces about one’s suffering, the effect of which is knowledge about those with whom one suffers, who share that same object of suffering, and with whom one is mutually striving to overcome it. Using the Derridian metaphor, technologies of suffering function as a kind of shibboleth which delivers suffering over from a singularity and subsumes sufferers in an alliance. This alliance is important to consider insofar as it produces certain political effects. Before considering closely the particular example of AIDS activism and ACT-UP, I want to first return to Derrida and Blanchot in order to reconsider a different ethical modality with respect to suffering that is relevant to consider in this context.

The Ethical Possibilities of Suffering

A lapse of time: it was only an interval, almost nothing, the infinite diminution of a musical interval, and what a note, what news, what music. The verdict. As if suddenly evil never, nothing evil ever, happened again. As though evil would only happen again with death—or only later, too late, so much later.

Derrida, Veils, p. 92

Somewhat in contrast to the above discussion of suffering as a discursive object, I want to consider an alternate ethical mode that attempts to maintain suffering in its singularity. In the first place, Blanchot’s discussion of suffering in The Infinite Conversation shows the paralyzing nature of the experience of the suffering as a singular experience, which raises serious problems about the possibility of an ethical or political deployment of this singularity to utilitarian ends. Second, I will argue that the Derridian notion of messianism without messianism offers a certain ethical modality that seeks to maintain the name of suffering while at the same time anticipating an absolute deliverance from suffering itself, a modality that escapes the political and ethical deadlocks in Blanchot’s analysis.

Blanchot speaks in Heideggerian terms of human’s as beings-towards-the-future, a mode of being that is threatened by an experience of suffering: “we are the being that is fixed toward the future, always ahead of itself and even in the delay it also is, forewarning and anticipating itself—would we not be fortunate to be drawn into an entirely other experience, if it happened that this experience were that of a time out of synchrony and as though deprived of the dimension of passing beyond, henceforth neither passing nor ever having had to pass?” (Blanchot, 1993, 44). This notion of a “time out of synchrony” recalls Derrida’s reading of Hamlet’s line of “the time is out of joint” in Specters of Marx. However, for Blanchot, this “entirely other experience” of suffering leads us to a deadlock that makes the kind of suffering which anticipates its own sublimation—as in the technologies of suffering discussed above—impossible. Blanchot says of this experience

This is an experience we do not have to go very far to find, if it is offered in the most common suffering, and first of all in physical suffering. No doubt, where it is a matter of a measured suffering, it is still endured, still, of course, suffered, but also brought back into our grasp and assumed, recaptured and even comprehended in the patience we become in the face of it. But it can lose this measure; it is even of its essence to be always already beyond measure. Suffering is suffering when one can no longer suffer it, and when, because of this non-power, one cannot cease suffering it. A singular situation. Time is as though arrested, merged with its interval. There, the present is without end, separated from every other present by an inexhaustible and empty infinite, the very infinite of suffering, and thus dispossessed of any future: a present without end and yet impossible as a present. The present of suffering is the abyss of the present, indefinitely hollowed out and in this hollowing indefinitely distended, radically alien to the possibility that one might be present to it through the mastery of presence. What has happened? Suffering has simply lost its hold on time, and has made us lose time. Would we then be freed in this state from any temporal perspective and redeemed, saved from time as it passes? Not at all: we are delivered over to another time—to time as other, as absence and neutrality; precisely to a time that can no longer redeem us, that constitutes no recourse. A time without event, without project, without possibility; not that pure immobile instant, the spark of the mystics, but an unstable perpetuity in which we are arrested and incapable of permanence, a time neither abiding nor granting the simplicity of a dwelling place. (ibid.)

Suffering is thus taken out of the discursively measured experience of time, and abides as an impossible experience, in the night, as Levinas might say. One can see Blanchot’s movement from the experience of suffering that I have discussed in terms of technologies of practical reason—in which suffering is “brought back into our grasp and assumed, recaptured and even comprehended”—to the singular experience of suffering which is beyond measure and calculation, separate from the linguistic community, the operations of discourse, and the orientation towards the future that constitutes humanity’s being-in-the-world.5

In order to escape this deadlock of suffering “without project” we must consider how to make an ethical project out of an impossible object. To this end, Blanchot’s notion of the second slope of literature and Derrida’s notion of messianism without messianism are useful here. The second slope of literature posits writing as a certain ethical act that aims, impossibly, to retrieve the night of singularity that an object is deprived of with the inauguration of the name. It corresponds to the act of Orpheus, discussed above, turning back and attempting to view Eurydice in her invisibility. This act of looking back has the potential to produce certain soteriological effects, to produce a certain salvation. This is because suffering, in its singularity, is not “suffering” with a name, but is that which is unnamed and unnamable, and therefore need not be suffering at all. Blanchot continues shortly after the above cited passage, arguing that when trapped in the singularity or event of suffering, we experience

a suffering that is almost indifferent, not suffered, but neutral (a phantom of suffering) insofar as the one who is exposed to it, precisely through this suffering, is deprived of the ‘I’ that would make him suffer it. So now we see it: the mark of such a movement is that, by the fact that we experience it, it escapes our power to undergo it; thus it is not beyond the trial of experience, but rather that trial from which we can no longer escape. An experience that one will represent to oneself as being strange and even as the experience of strangeness. But if it is so, let us recognize that it is this not because it is too removed. On

5 Derrida says in Of Grammatology: “Rousseau delineates man out of this possibility. Imagination inscribes the animal within human society. It makes the animal accessible to humankind. The paragraph of the Essay which we are considering ends thus: ‘He who imagines nothing senses no-one but himself; he is alone in the midst of humankind.’ This solitude or this nonbelonging to humankind is due to the fact that suffering remains mute and closed in upon itself. Which signifies on the one hand that it cannot open itself, by the awakening of pity, to the suffering of the other as other; and on the other hand that it cannot exceed itself toward death. Indeed, the animal does have a potential faculty of pity, but it imagines neither the suffering of the other as such nor the passage from suffering to death. Indeed, that is one and the same limit. The relation with the other and the relation with death are one and the same opening. That which is lacking in what Rousseau calls the animal is the ability to live its suffering as the suffering of another and as the threat of death” (1997, 187). the contrary, it is so close that we are prohibited from taking any distance from it—it is foreign in its very proximity. (44-45) The proximity and intimacy of the experience of suffering in its singularity refuses all subject-object orientations which would make suffering an instrument of consciousness; rather, suffering remains as that which deprives us of our positional consciousness with respect to beings-in-the-world, and as such it is no longer experienced as suffering. Thus, if we could return to this experience, suffering itself would be effaced as suffering – we would no longer suffer it. The second slope of literature which aims to retrieve this singularity could be considered an ethical modality that affirms the impossibility of this retrieval within discourse. Recalling Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster, suffering which is not that which we undergo but that which goes under, not what one writes about, but that which writes, may no longer be suffering as a problem, a suffering beyond all knowledge. It could be experienced as “the calm, the burn of the holocaust, the annihilation of noon—the calm of the disaster,” (1995b, 6) as the disaster that disrupts our subjectivity and so is not experienced as a disaster and not experienced – rather, it is experience itself, the experience in the face of which we cannot locate ourselves as anything but an absolute passivity. Because of this we still run the risk of being trapped in this experience of experience, without escape or salvation. As such, I want to consider Derrida’s notion of messianism without messianism as a possibility for reinstating the orientation towards the future that is made impossible by the singularity of suffering.

Suffering before the name is suffering “without project;” in order for there to be a work of literature, I argue that a new ethical modality is needed that is not present explicitly in Blanchot’s discussion of suffering. The second slope of literature figures as a certain nostalgia for a purity before the “fall” represented by the name or the written word. I argue that this nostalgia is a trap, one that makes impossible the possibility of an ethical or political project. In contrast, I want to discuss Derrida’s notion of messianism without messianism, not only in his discussion in Specters of Marx but as an ethical modality that is present throughout his works. In Specters of Marx Derrida interrogates the possibility of an ethics of anticipation as eschatology without content, saying:

At nightfall, one does not know if imminence means that the expected one has already returned. Had he not already announced himself? To announce oneself, moreover, is that not already to be there in some way? One does not know if the expectation prepares the coming of the future-to-come or if it recalls the repetition of the same, of the same thing as ghost…This not-knowing is not a lacuna. No progress of knowledge could saturate an opening that must have nothing to do with knowing. Nor therefore with ignorance. The opening must preserve this heterogeneity as the only chance of an affirmed or rather reaffirmed future. It is the future itself, it comes from there. The future is its memory. In the experience of the end, in its insistant, instant, always imminently eschatological coming, at the extremity of the extreme today, there would thus be announced the future of what comes. More than ever, for the future- to-come can announce itself as such and in its purity only on the basis of a past end: beyond, if that’s possible, the last extremity. If that’s possible, if there is any future, but how can one suspend such a question or deprive oneself of such a reserve without concluding in advance, without reducing in advance both the future and its chance? Without totalizing in advance? We must discern here between eschatology and teleology, even if the stakes of such a difference risk constantly being effaced in the most fragile and slight insubstantiality—and will be in a certain way always and necessarily deprived of any insurance against this risk. Is there not a messianic extremity, an eskhaton whose ultimate event (immediate rupture, unheard-of interruption, untimeliness of the infinite surprise, heterogeneity without accomplishment) can exceed, at each moment, the final term of a phusis, such as work, the production, and the telos of any history? (Derrida, 2012, “Part 1: Injunctions of Marx) John D. Caputo takes up the question of whether this messianism of Derrida is a historical inheritance of Jewish or Christian historical discourse, or whether it represents a structure of messianism in general (a question Derrida himself raises but leaves unanswered): “Either: the messianic fits into a Heideggarian- Bultmannian schema of a demythologizing fundamental ontology in which one would strip away the existentiell particularities of the particular historical religions in order to unearth the universal, existential structures, the existentialia that represent the conditions of possibility of ontico-existentiell messianisms. Or: the historical messianisms have a kind of absolute anteriority without which the messianic would be completely unknown” (Caputo, 137). Caputo responds to this deadlock by, in proper Derridian fashion, blurring the boundaries between this Either/Or, and arguing that Derrida’s messianism is simply one more messianism among a number of historical messianisms, but one that repeats the possibility for messianism as such (142). Without engaging directly with this answer, let me say as my own response that historical messianisms serve as a certain discursive technology (of suffering, perhaps) that interpellatively situate and orient subjects in an anticipatory ethical mode. Derrida’s messianism inherits nothing other than this ethical mode of anticipation, of attention to the announcement of the other at each moment. In order to understand this announcement that makes this ethical orientation possible, we must return to Derrida’s earlier work.

The messianic is present in Derrida’s work from the beginning. Already in “Différance,” Derrida ends on the strange note of the possibility of hope as an anticipatory mode with respect to the trace of Being. In the first place, Derrida rejects a nostalgia for the lost purity of the unique name: “It must be conceived without nostalgia; that is, it must be conceived outside the myth of the purely maternal or paternal language belonging to the lost fatherland of thought. On the contrary, we must affirm it—in the sense that Nietzsche brings affirmation into play—with a certain laughter and with a certain dance” (1973, 159). Thus, Derrida posits the possibility of an affirmative stance towards the name of suffering, and not as a nostalgia for suffering before the name. How is this possible? Derrida continues: “After this laughter and dance, after this affirmation that is foreign to any dialectic, the question arises as to the other side of nostalgia, which I will call Heideggarian hope. I am not unaware that this term may be somewhat shocking. I venture it all the same, without excluding any of its implications…” (ibid.). Derrida concludes quite provocatively: “Such is the question: the marriage between speech and Being in the unique word, in the finally proper name. Such is the question that enters into the affirmation put into play by difference. The question bears (upon) each of the words in this sentence: ‘Being / speaks / through every language; / everywhere and always /’” (160).

How to make sense of this possibility, this hope for the arrival of the finally proper name? The hope lies in the fact that in différance, in the play of difference and sameness, the name of suffering already plays at its own overcoming. Derrida notes earlier that “In this way the metaphysical text is understood; it is still readable, and remains to be read. It proposes both the monument and mirage of the trace, the trace as simultaneously traced and effaced, simultaneously alive and dead, alive as always to simulate even life in its preserved inscription: it is a pyramid” (157). The name is indeed a tomb, as noted above, but one that already plays at resurrection – archaeology and eschatology. In this ethical modality of hope—of hope without hope, hope not for concrete deliverance in Cartesian time but the affirmation of the experience of hope itself, the affirmation of a horizon of hope without horizon, without content—we are able to strategically play with the paradoxes and aporias of the word. We must remember of the tomb of the word that “the apparently outer edge of an enclosure, far from being simple, simply external and circular, in accordance with the philosophical representation of philosophy, makes no sign beyond itself, toward what is utterly other, without becoming double or dual, without making itself be ‘represented,’ refolded, superposed, re-marked within the enclosure, at least in what the structure produces as an effect of interiority” (Bloom et al. 100-101). This doubling reflects the palimpsestic nature of writing and means that we can identify and strategically privilege the different layers of difference in what is deferred by the word, by the discourse of technologies of suffering, in order to produce transformations in the discourse itself. Through a process of re-reading, of rewriting the proper name, we can discover and deconstruct the specific collocation of suffering within an economy that interpellates sufferers and incites them to take particular actions to alleviate suffering, and consider the possibilities of relocating, repositioning, and reorienting such relationships between suffering and discourse, thus disrupting the discourse itself. In my reading of Derrida, the fact of the name’s paradoxes of différance means that one can strategically deploy the name against the very discourse which attempts to operationalize it. This deployment opens up a space of rupture which gestures towards the dissolution of the name in a new series of relationships and in a different chain of signification, and anticipates its self-overcoming in its final repetition in which it finally dissolves into its other, its difference, its eschaton. Maintaining and affirming the word in play, the name of suffering in its differential relationship to its other, to salvation, anticipates the moment in which all things against which suffering is articulated—joy, bliss, eternal joy and salvation—are finally ushered in, the moment in which “suddenly evil never, nothing evil ever, happened again. As though evil would only happen again with death—or only later, too late, so much later.” In my final section, I explore the political possibilities of this ethical modality in queer messianic discourse, and argue that there is a political soteriology which goes even beyond Derrida’s ethical modality.

Queer Messianisms and the Politics of Soteriological Rupture

No doubt there are many queer projects that reflect many of the themes, from passivity to play, that we have been discussing. J. Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure and Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive are two prominent examples. However, I want to consider a few queer technologies of suffering that could be termed messianic in nature, and demonstrate how these technologies produce subjective affects that are conducive to continued action and willing despite the suffering they name and even incite. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate how technologies of suffering produce a certain economy of suffering that, rather than overcoming suffering in a final disclosure, serve to continually reproduce the conditions of suffering, moving it through the process of investing it with meaning, moving along the chain of signification, but ultimately never escaping this chain which must be regarded as a whole, invested in the unit of suffering as much as its opposite (salvation). Much like the technologies designed to address the problem of masturbation in Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, ultimately incited the problem of masturbation in order to legitimate their own operation, economies of suffering, like all economy, relies on the continual reinvestment discourse with new sources of suffering. Soteriologies as technologies of suffering have the property Nietzsche identified with Christianity of making the suffering they save us from paradoxically “come true”:

The founder of Christianity thought that there was nothing of which men suffered more than their sins. That was his error—the error of one who felt that he was without sin and who lacked firsthand experience. Thus his soul grew full of wonderful and fantastic compassion for a misery that even among his people, who had invented sin, was rarely a very great misery.—But the Christians have found a way of vindicating their master since then and of sanctifying his error by making it “come true”… (GS 138) Technologies of suffering paradoxically produce, name, and overcome suffering; like all technologies, they carry their own internal logic that governs their operation and produces the effects of that operation within discourse. Let us take a few examples.

In the first place, we have the familiar example of Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better Campaign”6 as a simple structure of a “messianic” technology of suffering. The operation of this technology is simple: it interpellates its sufferers as queer, and as youth, thus producing its subjective orientation. It then names their suffering, as bullying, as harassment, as feelings of shame and worthlessness, but immediately begins its operation on this suffering. Bullying and harassment, we are reminded, are terrible and wrong, and shame and worthlessness are natural to feel but ultimately must be overcome. This overcoming is a mode of anticipation: one day, it will be better. The Campaign promises an eventual cessation of suffering qua bullying that gives queer youth the strength, the subjective orientation towards the suffering-object now named, to persevere in anticipation of the fulfillment of this promise. The “It Gets Better Campaign” does not alter the actual conditions that produce bullying, but ultimately serve to work on the suffering that results and discursively invest it with meaning. This is no doubt true regardless of the fact that the participants in the campaign would prefer to change the conditions and render the technology obsolete. The “good intentions” of the creation of this technology does not alter the internal logic of this technology itself, which relies on the persistence of the conditions of suffering. Nor is this to say that the campaign is “harmful,” or that we ought to abandon it. Arguably this technology is effective in accomplishing its goals of moving individual subjects from a place of alienation and helplessness to a sense of hope and purpose in the future. However, such technology is not universally effective; the name of suffering it produces is a shibboleth, as discussed above, and there are certain individuals for whom the interpellation fails. Obviously those who are bullied but are not queer, and those who are queer but not bullied are not fully interpellated by this discourse (although it may have a certain effect on them nonetheless). Others for whom the structure of “promise” of the campaign rings hollow, those queers who cannot truly hope for the deliverance of the promise of a middle class future in the working world where they will be respected and successful, and who know this, will fail to see themselves reflected in the narrative put forward by this discourse. In short, technologies of suffering have the function of shibboleth in that they align certain discursive orientations for particular subjects, with the effect that there will always be certain subjects for whom this alignment is unavailable.

The narrative of the closet is another example of a technology of suffering that, in certain queer discourses, takes on almost messianic proportions. At work here is a politics of visibility in which, it is proposed, the more queers that come out of the closet, the more queers will be accepted for who they are. More queers will become visible, and closeted queers will know of them and be encourage to come out themselves. Ultimately the goal of this technology is all queers “out” of the closet. Yet we know from Eve Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet how this discourse reifies queerness along lines of sexual-object choice, thus continually inciting a particular set of subjects who need to “come out”, thus discursively producing them as “in the closet”. Judith Butler comments on the messianism of the closet:

Conventionally, one comes out of the closet; so we are out of the closet, but into what? What new unbounded spatiality? The room, the den, the attic, the basement, the house, the bar, the university, some new enclosure whose door, like Kafka’s door, produces the expectation of a fresh air and

6 The “It Gets Better” project can be read about at itgetsbetter.org. a light of illumination that never arrives? … For being ‘out’ always depends to some extent on being ‘in;’ it gains its meaning only within that polarity. Hence, being ‘out’ must produce the closet again and again in order to maintain itself as ‘out.’ In this sense, outness can only produce a new opacity; and the closet produces the promise of a disclosure that can, by definition, never come.7 Thus we see how the economy of the closet locates certain subjects in a discursive space as “in” or “out” of the closet, requiring the continual reproduction of those discursive space, such that the logic of the discourse continually renews and re-asserts itself in its own operation.

Perhaps we ought to consider a more theoretical queer project. José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia is has an almost Derridian feel in its messianism. Muñoz opens his introduction with the following memorable lines:

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romance of the negative and toiling in the present…Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world. (1)

Despite its Derridian resonances, we must note some key differences. In the first place this is a hope with a horizon, whereas Derridian hope is horizon-less. In the second place, this queerness produces a subjective alignment that incites concrete action in the present. Thus it appears to be more of a technological apparatus of operationalizing suffering than the kind of play Derrida has in mind. It is ultimately a denial of the name of suffering, understood as the present conditions of the world, and an affirmation of the future. Muñoz’s queerness aims to bring us out of the deadlocks of passivity of suffering discussed by Blanchot and restore our being-in-the-world as beings-towards-the-future. And yet, it also contests our subjectivity against other technologies of suffering which do not aim to overcome suffering in the future, but aim to invest it with meaning in the here-and-now. These technologies of the “romance of the negative and toiling in the present” operate as much as Muñoz’s technology of queerness as a horizon on the suffering they name, but they name it differently and do not incite action towards altering the material conditions of suffering. Muñoz’s discourse formulates such technologies as quietist, and encourages subjects to take concrete actions to bring about the horizon of queerness. I cannot understate the value I find in this discourse; nevertheless, it seems necessary to me to venture a humble critique of this horizon of queerness.

Muñoz puts forward a reading of O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke with You” that strikes us as perhaps naïve. He states,

This poem tells us of a quotidian act, having a Coke with somebody, that signifies a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, and a utopian potentiality. The quotidian act of sharing a Coke,

7 Butler, Judith, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove et al., Routledge, 1993, p. 309 consuming a common commodity with a beloved with whom one shares secret smiles, trumps fantastic moments in the history of art. Though the poem is clearly about the present, it is a present that is now squarely in the past and its queer relationality promises a future. The fun of having a Coke is a mode of exhilaration in which one views a restructured sociality. The poem tells us that mere beauty is insufficient for the aesthete speaker, which echoes Bloch’s own aesthetic theories concerning the utopian function of art. If art’s limit were beauty—according to Bloch—it is simply not enough. The utopian function is enacted by a certain surplus in the work that promises a futurity, something that is not quite there. (6-7) And yet, isn’t it precisely this surplus of meaning which reproduces the effects of the act of consumption? We might venture a Baudrillardian critique here citing the latter’s comments that “Consumer society (objects, product, advertising), for the first time in history, offers the individual the opportunity for total fulfilment and liberation” in which consumption is “an authentic language, a new culture, where pure and simple consumption is transformed into a means of individual and collective expression” (Baudrillard, 12). This interpellative surplus of the act of consumption is deceptive: “’Free to be oneself’ in fact means: free to project one’s desires onto produced good. ‘Free to enjoy life’ means: free to regress and be irrational, and thus adapt to a certain social organization of production” (13). This surplus of meaning in the Coke bottle is precisely that which has the effect of reproducing the present social organization of society.

All of the above critique is not to deny the value of these technologies; on the contrary, is precisely my intention to argue for the value of technologies of suffering, insofar as the provide the means for concrete action and a deliverance from the singularity of the present. Nietzsche goes so far to say that the soteriology of the will in asceticism serves as the final bastion against nihilism and the will to nothingness. More modestly, I claim that technologies of suffering produce suffering as an object upon which certain operations, manipulations, and concrete actions may be performed, thus precluding the possibility that we are overcome by the present of suffering. With each of these technologies, we must ask, What are the conditions for its success, and what are the conditions for its failure? What subjective orientation does it produce? Which subjects are successfully interpellated by this technology? For whom is it available, and who is excluded? And what series of relationships are established that move suffering from its status as a problem to its discursive projection as a solution? What is the value and content of this solution (salvation, liberation, revolution, steadfastness, deliverance, resurrection, etc.)? And what material conditions make its operation possible?

The above represents an analysis of soteriology as it operates discursively. However, what of the Derridian possibilities for disrupting the discourse in its normal functioning? I want to consider one final example of queer activism, that of ACT-UP during the height of the AIDS crisis. My primary text will be that of the documentary “How to Survive a Plague” (France, 2012). This film serves itself as a sort of technology of suffering, memorializing one of the prominent figures in AIDS activism, Bob Rafsky, and encouraging viewers to continue combating the AIDS crisis as it continues in the world. In its framing and appropriation of the political acts of ACT-UP members, it instrumentalizes them in as a certain text which makes a compelling case for the seriousness and importance of these actions. However, some of these actions are worthy of consideration as ethical and political modes of resistance to suffering. In the first place, we must distinguish between the technologies of power at work in ACT-UP, which produced concrete political effects such as the greater availability of treatment, more of a patient voice in treatment agendas, and greater dissemination of knowledge of the disease, and those technology of suffering which made not political power but the suffering of the disease their object. The goal of these technologies was not eradicating the material conditions of suffering, but to give meaning to suffering in the here-and-now. Suffering is named as disease, plague, silence, and death, and is somatically mapped onto the bodies of victims. The problem that was produced around this suffering was the feeling of plague, of extinction, of complete dying out. As Gregg Bordowitz puts it, the question that AIDS victims faced was “How to remain hopeful in the face of increasing loss?” Many of the activists express that they did not anticipate living through the plague; their goal was not to overcome the disease but to give it meaning and hope. No doubt there were political elements at work no matter how hopeless the situation appeared, and the goal of ACT-UP remained soundly political throughout the crisis. It is my interest to demonstrate how ACT-UP’s technologies of suffering, at certain moments, took an affirmative stance towards this suffering that, in proper Derridian style, produced ruptures in the economies of discourse that maintained the material conditions of this suffering.

There is a certain Blanchot-esque passivity at work in certain of ACT-UP’s acts of resistance. Jim Eigo captures the primary mode by which suffering was both represented and transformed in How to Survive a Plague: “We could do it because we could deliver hundreds and sometimes thousands of bodies. We had people with AIDS putting their bodies on the line, flopping out in the street saying, fine, this is my body, take me away.” As the suffering of AIDS is named and produced as a somatic suffering, a suffering of the body, using one’s body to resist it is not to instrumentalize that suffering but to be oneself an instrument of the suffering. We do not write the disaster; it writes us. Suffering is not undergone but goes under: the disease itself is dropped in heaps of bodies squarely in the laps of those who are discursively produced as responsible for the plague. The epitome of such actions that take an affirmative stance towards suffering are those in which death itself becomes a means of resistance: the dumping of cremated bodies of AIDS victims of loved ones on the White House lawn. One activist comments:

I think the quilt8 itself does good stuff, and is moving. Still, it’s like making something beautiful out of the epidemic. And I felt like doing something like this is a way of showing that there is nothing beautiful about it. Y’know this is what I’m left with. I’ve got a box full of ashes and some bone chips. Y’know, there’s no beauty in that. And I felt like a statement like this is like saying, this is what George Bush has done…these are our loved ones and this is what they’ve been reduced to, and we’re bringing them to the person who’s responsible for their death. The dumping of such ashes on the lawn of the White House figures as a certain gift of death, a gift of the disaster, in which the disaster of the plague of AIDS itself becomes the means of resistance to the plague. The plague victims became the very specters haunting the symbolic order. Suffering is not produced as a problem but becomes the active agent in a passive subject: the sufferer is passive and suffering activates the resistance. Simon Critchley discusses the rupturing structure of this gift in terms of writing: “Without remuneration or return, writing must be a pure sacrifice or pure gift that does not collapse back into the restricted economy of exchange. Writing must be an excessive gift in a general economy…” (Critchley, 38). He quotes Blanchot as saying “The writer is called upon by his dread to perform a genuine sacrifice of himself. He must spend (dépense), he must consume, the forces that make him a writer [or sufferer!]. The spending must also be genuine. Either to be content with not writing any more, or to write a work in which all the values that the mind held in potential reappear in the form of effects, is to prevent the sacrifice from being made or to replace it by an exchange” (ibid.). The plague of suffering becomes the absolute gift that ruptures the general economy of biopolitics and

8 The AIDS Quilt which covered the National Mall with thousands of names of AIDS victims on the day of the protest necropolitics (c.f. Mbembe) of the state’s discourse. Similarly, in the case of ACT-UP’s protest in the cathedral of the Archbishop who condemned condom usage as a means of fighting the plague, the shouting and bodies dropped in the aisles could not be anything but an absolute rupture. The Christian economy of death, of sin, death, redemption, resurrection, and eternal life, could not accommodate or remunerate the men lying on the floor shouting “You’re killing us! Stop it!” over and over again.

Conclusion: Beyond Derridian Play to a Technology of Suffering as Rupture

We are measured by the compass of our suffering.

Aimé Césaire, “Notebook of a Return to My Native Land”

These acts of ACT-UP were by no means the maintaining of suffering in its singularity. Nor were they the ethical mode that aims to bring such singularity to play in discourse. There is a largely Derridian element of play and affirmation of the name of suffering as an impossible object. However, I argue that ACT-UP goes beyond this Derridian notion and produced a technology of suffering as rupture. Suffering was indeed produced for ACT-UP members as a discursive object, about which knowledge could be produced (what caused it, who was to blame, how to treat it, etc.). However, I argue that certain of the practices and executions of this technology figured as a positional singularity that refused to be objectified or instrumentalized by the discourses that produced and resisted it, the necropolitical institutions that set aside AIDS victims as a population for death. The suffering of AIDS victims when named as plague was a certain shibboleth that interpellated and created a certain community of resistance, and which refused to be treated as an object of discourse. In so doing, it refused the interpellation of normative discourse, it was a counter-discourse that ruptured normative discourse from below. Suffering as such is sublimated into its other, into rupture and resistance as salvation.

In this discourse, in the moment of rupture, suffering is not that which can be objectified or measured; it is rather, with Césaire, that which measures, that which produces political effects (rather than being merely a political effect itself). Despite the fact that this technology is a political discourse that goes beyond Derridian ethics, it retains the Derridian structure of “the singularity of a place of speech, of a place of experience, and of a link of filiation, places and links from which alone one may address oneself to the ghost” (Derrida, 2012, “Part 1: Injunctions of Marx”). The specter of AIDS victims is quite literally invoked to haunt those held responsible by ACT-UP for the crisis. Derridian hauntology here receives a hyper-literal political formulation: Bob Rafsky, at the funeral procession which brought the body of a prominent AIDS activist to the White House, is depicted in “How to Survive a Plague” as addressing George Bush, saying, “Mark’s spirit will haunt you until the end of your days, so that in the moment of your defeat, you’ll remember our defeat, and in the moment of your death, you’ll remember our death” (France, 2012). By inverting the very necropolitical structures which set AIDS victims aside as a population for death, AIDS activists were able to bring the haunting specters of structural oppression to rupture the discourses that support that structure. The political effect is rupture, of a space opened up, of “justice as incalculability of the gift and singularity of the an-economic ex-position to others. ‘The relation to others—that is to say, justice,’ writes Levinas. Whether he knows it or not, Hamlet is speaking in the space opened up by this question—the appeal of the gift, singularity, the coming of the event, the excessive or exceeded relation to the other—when he declares ‘The time is out of joint’” (Derrida, 2012, Part 1). What time could be more out of joint than the time of plague? The acts of AIDS activists did politically what deconstruction accomplishes in the text: strategically privileging the differential character of the name, repeating and re-substituting it within the chain of signification, and producing ruptures in that chain. ACT-UP took the marginal necropolitical bodies of AIDS victims and brought them to the (apparent) center of discursive power. As always, the discourse produces the possibility of its own rupture; all one has to do is know how to strategically repeat the terms of the discourse themselves in order to produce this dissonance. Soteriology as technology of suffering requires that we change ourselves in order to instrumentalize our object: we perform certain actions to reduce it, we alter our orientation towards it, etc. In contrast, the soteriological politics of ACT-UP required that AIDS victims, as bodies of disease, plague, dying, in a necropolitcal landscape, simply be themselves in order to produce discursive effects. “This is my body: a suffering body, a dying body,” says the AIDS victim to the discourse that produced her; what economy could accommodate or anticipate such a gift? References

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