The Politics of SufferingA two week intensive postgraduate seminar led by Dr Magdalena Zolkos Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Social Justice

Date: 21 October – 6 November (except 29-30 October and 3 November)

Time: 10am-1pm

Venue: Institute for Social Justice Level 2, Meeting Room 2.02 Mary MacKillop Place 7-11 Mount Street, North Sydney

Magdalena is a political theorist specializing in the fields of memory politics; historical justice and reconciliation; cultural and psychoanalytic trauma theory; emotions and affect; contemporary democratic theory; and feminist theory. She has held the Izaak Killam Postdoctoral position at the Department of Political Science, University of

Alberta (Canada); the Irmgard Coninx Research Grant at Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin Sozialforschung (Berlin); and Marie Curie Research Fellowship at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent at Canterbury (UK).She is interested in how the legacy of historical trauma affects the trajectories of democratic transition and consolidation, conditions the play of affective politics, and inspires, though at times also constrains, practices of emancipatory politics and resistance. She is currently working on two research projects. The first project focuses on traumatic memory objects and mnemonic object-worlds in politics and ethics of response to historical injustice. The second project concerns the aesthetics and discourses of memorialization in contemporary Europe.

Institute for Social Justice Seminar SeriesSeminar Leader: Dr Magdalena Zolkos

Course Description The notion of suffering has become an important category of political identification and visibility in the context of such diverse issues as global poverty, natural disasters, war, forced migration, and animal rights. Some have critiqued the political uses of the notion of suffering and argued that it is essentially a theological category, and that the suffering subject is a disempowered, passive or sacrificial figure who relies on the compassion and humanitarian sentiments of others, rather than articulates her/his vulnerabilities in a more political language of inequality and injustice. Others, including Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, asserted the transformative, even emancipatory, potential of suffering in struggles against oppression and domination. This course seeks to provide a framework for the exploration of, discussion and critical reflection about the contemporary idiom and discourses of suffering, about the place of suffering in the politics of resistance against neo-liberal and neo-colonial violence, and about the attention suffering has received in theoretical humanities and social sciences in the last years.

This course has three parts. First (classes 2-4), it will focus on the socio-theoretical and narrative accounts of the lived experience of suffering in relation both to “extraordinary” instances of suffering (such as torture) and to everyday suffering, and on how the notion of suffering is mediated through categories of class, gender and race. Next (classes 5-7), the course will draw attention to the idiom of “the suffering other” in the context of contemporary humanitarianism, as well as in politics of vulnerability and relationality. Here in particular the problem of distance to, mediation and appropriation of the suffering of the other are thematized and explored. Finally (classes 8-10), this course will ask whether the notion of suffering can play a role in the politics of resistance and disruption by suggesting the limits of its absorption within the neo-liberal frame, and by asking about the ethics of response to suffering.

Topics and Readings

The participants are expected to bring with them to each class “study notes”: 200-400 words of reflections on each of the readings (not so much a summary of the readings, but their response to and interpretation of it; what the participants have found particularly useful/interesting or challenging/problematic about the readings, etc.). We will start our discussion of the readings by presenting these notes to the other participants.

Please note, this is not a drop – in course, participants are required to attend all 10 sessions.

i. The idiom of Suffering in Our Times (21 October)

1. Didier Fassin: “Suffering Unveiled. Listening to the Excluded and the Marginalized.” In: Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011): 21-43.

2. Iain Wilkinson: “What Is Suffering?” In: Iain Wilkinson, Suffering: A Sociological Introduction (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2005): 16-45.

ii. On Pain (22 October)

1. Elaine Scarry: “Introduction.” In: Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985): 3-23.

2. Joanna Bourke: “Estrangement.” In: Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain. From Prayer to Painkillers (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014): 27-52.

iii. On Torture (23 October)

1. Elaine Scarry: “The Structure of Torture: The Conversion of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power.” In: Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985): 27-59.

2. Jean Améry: “Torture.” In: Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits (New York, Schocken Books, 1986): 21-40.

iv. Suffering and the Everyday (26 October)

1. Lauren Berlant: “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency).” Critical Inquiry 33 (Summer 2007): 754-780.

2. Saskia Sassen: “Shrinking Economies, Growing Expulsions.” In: Saskia Sassen, Expulsions. Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2014): 12-79.

v. Suffering and the Other (27 October)

1. Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others (London, Picador, 2004).

vi. Distant Suffering (28 October)

1. Luc Boltanski: “The Question of the Spectator.” In: Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering. Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004): 3-56.

vii. Mediations and Appropriations of Suffering (2 November)

1. Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman: “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times.” In: Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret Lock (eds.), Social Suffering (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996): 1-24.

2. Lilie Chouliaraki: “Mediation and Public Life.” In: Lilie Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering (London, SAGE, 2006): 18-37.

viii. The Suffering of Animals (4 November)

1. J.M. Coetzee: Elizabeth Costello (New York, Viking, 2003): 59-90.

2. Nikolas Kompridis: “Recognition and Receptivity: Forms of Normative Response in the Lives of the Animals We Are.” New Literary History 44.1 (2013): 1-24.

ix. Testimony and Trauma (5 November)

1. Veena Das: “The Act of Witnessing. Violence, Gender, and Subjectivity.” In: Veena Das, Life and Words: Exploring Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkley, University of California Press, 2006): 59-78.

2. Shoshana Felman: “Theatres of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust.” Critical Inquiry 27 (Winter 2001): 201-238.

x. The Empathic Subject (6 November)

1. Lauren Berlant: “Compassion (and Withholding).” In: Lauren Berlant (ed.) Compassion. The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York, Routledge, 2004): 1-14.

2. Leslie Jamison: “The Empathy Exams.” In: Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (Minneapolis, Graywolf Press, 2014): 1-27.

Contact For more information and to RSVP please contact isj@acu.edu.au or call (02) 9739 2789