On Pain and Passibility, or the Temporalities of Ensoulment

The intervention of Chapter 2 in Formations of the Secular (Asad 2003), “Thinking about Agency and Pain,” hinges on formulating pain as a species of action. This specification is also a means of theorizing the temporality of formations themselves, the temporalization of form. The modern concept of agency, it turns out, is a force of temporal homogenization or, more simply, a spatialization of time that necessarily mistakes pain for an ahistorical null point.