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In this paper Andrew Edgar draws on the work of Levinas, Adorno, and Nietzsche to develop a theory about how suffering might be represented without being minimized or rationalized.
He begins by discussing Levinas's account of extreme suffering in his essay ‘Useless suffering’. This account is a particular version of Levinas's general view about our relation to others, that others have an absolute moral claim on us, and that we come to understand ourselves as ethical and social beings through our relation to the Other. Levinas argues that, from a Kantian standpoint, pain is unlike our other experiences because it cannot be assimilated and short-circuits the workings of our other faculties. It becomes a modality in itself and shapes the way all our other experiences are apprehended and undermines the unifying activity of the transcendental Kantian subject. Pain also undermines and subverts the Kantian category of negation, according to Sartre the basis of human freedom (because it gives us the ability to imagine things as other than they are). We would like to negate and refuse the pain, but we can't. With what is left of our capacity as transcendental subjects, we struggle to give meaning to what is essentially meaningless, and if it is the symptom of some crippling, disfiguring or mortal illness, we have the anxiety of anticipating more of it in the future, which adds to it. Thus, on the one hand pain is meaningless and on the other hand our attempts to give it meaning make it worse and this is wrong. Yet to fail to give it meaning at all would be to reduce us to a level of animality. The challenge is to find a way to give it meaning that does not make it worse.
There is for Levinas a profound immorality in trying to explain away or justify suffering. And surely this is so not just for Levinas. As someone who has both taught philosophy and sat in the therapist's chair, stories of the abuse of children and the general cruelty of human life experienced in the latter hav