Liberalism and Human Suffering (PDF)

ASMA ABBAS is Assistant Professor of Politics and Philosophy at Bard College, USA.

"Asma Abbas offers a complex critique of the way liberal thought has shaped the understanding of human suffering and, inspired by Marx and Nietzsche, she articulates alternative ways to think about suffering. Her argument is radical in the etymological sense of this word - it goes to the root of our political life by asking questions about what constitutes us as subjects and binds us to others. The book is intellectually exciting and morally challenging." - David Adams, Associate Professor, Department of English, Ohio State University

"Asma Abbas's Liberalism and Human Suffering develops a deep and bracing critique of liberal conceptions of justice. With unusual drive and wit, Abbas shows that justice in the liberal state requires theatrical displays of the suffering it claims to redress. In the ways it forces suffering to work for redress, liberal justice transforms suffering into the familiar and fetishistic forms of harm and injury which function as unthreatening calls for a rebalancing of the scales. Abbas's withering analysis of the calculative aesthetics of liberal justice demonstrates with mounting power how liberalism works not to address suffering but to cancel its political force. Far, then, from naming a regime of political justice, liberalism, we are driven by Abbas to conclude, is a regime that guarantees that suffering will never be experienced, heard, rallied to, as a cry for a new form of political life. Since, by contrast, real justice demands concrete transformations of our current social relations, we must find ways to overcome liberal practices of justice.

In peeling back the layers of injury that liberalism has added to the insults of human history, Abbas offers us the opportunity to think differently about the alternative forms of life that suffering makes possible. Her philosophical touchstones for this project are Marx and Nietzsche. Indeed, the second half of Abbas's book, in its passionate refusal to submit to the fear