Commensuration, Pain, and the Politics of Number

Like the rest of us on the AAA panel for which these remarks were originally prepared, I experienced the months since 7 October 2023 as a reminder of the horrific realities of this hellish world, in which we inhabit a time not only of utter depravity, of dispossession, of abandonment, and of brutal destruction, but also of indifference and mass cruelty. The third chapter of Formations of the Secular reflects directly on the themes of cruelty and torture. The chapter spells out four connected points at its beginning: (1) “the modern history of ‘torture’ is not only a record of the progressive prohibition of cruel, inhuman, and degrading practices. It is also part of a secular story of how one becomes truly human”; (2) “Cross-cultural” measures of “making moral and legal judgments about pain and suffering” are conditioned by historical and cultural senses; (3) “New ways of conceptualizing suffering . . . and sufferer . . . are increasingly universal in scope but particular in prescriptive content”; and (4) “The modern dedication to eliminating pain and suffering conflicts with other commitments and values” (individual, state) (Asad 2003: 101). Here Asad is not just pointing out that the scales are weighted—that some suffering is weighed differently than other types; certain kinds of anguish do not register at all in secular liberal discourses while others are seen as necessary and adequate to the civilizing process or to becoming proper human subjects—but that the frame of measurement itself, the possibility of deploying comparison of disparate kinds of suffering, has “become central to cross-cultural judgment in modern thought and practice” (ibid.: 109). He asks us to pay attention to the very presumption that “subjective experiences of pain can be objectively compared” (ibid.: 108), even though in themselves they are “incommensurable” (ibid.: 109).