Chapter 2

Suffering, Compassion, and the Possibility

of a Humane Politics

Jeff Malpas

I merely wanted to express that anguish I feel every day when

faced with the prostituting of words, the slandered victims, the
smug justification of oppression, the insane admiration of force.
Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death

The issue of human suffering is one that I will approach here through three ques-
tions: (1) What is the relation between suffering and temporality; (2) What is the
relation between suffering and the singularity of the person, and (3) What is the
relation between suffering and a humane politics? These questions are not arbitrary,
since not only are they interconnected in ways that I hope will become evident as
my discussion proceeds, but they also concern the relation between suffering and
human being, and it is this issue that seems to me to be central here. The focus on
this relation is not meant to suggest that humanity requires suffering, which is true
at least to the extent that being human requires the capacity to suffer (and perhaps
simply having that capacity will make some degree of suffering inevitable), nor that
only human beings can suffer (which is manifestly false1), but rather that coming

1 
That non-human animals can suffer seems clear even if their suffering is not, in all respects, iden-
tical to human suffering. One might argue, in fact, that there is a distinction between suffering and
mere pain or discomfort that holds in the case of adult human experience, but that does not hold
in the case of the experience of non-human animals or human infants. The suffering of animals is
an issue that I do not address in the discussion below, although it undoubtedly introduces further
complications for any attempt to articulate an ethical and political stance that is indeed attentive to
the fact of suffering. In particular, one of the questions that my account here immediately raises is
whether the refusal of suffering must also entail a refusal of the suffering of non-human animals,
and if so, what the implications of this would be (would it not imply the alignment of the position
outlined here with some of the stronger animal rights positions?) While I agree that this is an im-
portant and pressing issue, it is not one that I have time properly to address here.

J. Malpas ()
School of Philosophy, University of Tasmania, Hobart 7001, Tasmania, Australia
Department of Philosophy, LaTrobe University, Bundoora 3086, Victoria, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

J. Malpas, N. Lickiss (eds.), Perspectives on Human Suffering, 9

DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2795-3_2, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
10 J. Malpas

to a proper recognition of the human, and maintaining a sense of that recognition,

is fundamentally tied to a proper recognition of the nature and reality of human
suffering, and that this is what also supports the possibility of any properly ethical
stance or indeed an ethical, which is to say also, a humane, politics. In this respect,
the relation between human suffering and human being directs our attention to the
centrality of compassion as an essential element in what it is to be human, and so
also in any proper response to the human.

Suffering and Temporality

So it is that Tasmania has never come to terms with its past. That past has the stature of a
dark family secret – quite literally a dark family secret – the half-brother bogeyman boarded
up out of sight in the attic. He/it is shame for our bastard birth as a prison for the unwanted
dregs of the British slums and our subsequent legacy of depravity hard upon vileness, bru-
tality fast upon atrocity. He/it is institutionalized sodomist rape, its echoes clearly audible in
the hysteria that surrounded the 1990s debate about the legal status of sodomy. He/it is the
unbearable legacy of brutal dispossession and the near-complete genocide of those whose
land this was. He/it is a weight of guilt that could not be borne. (Hay 2002, p. 29)

Tasmania is a large island (about the size of Switzerland) that lies off the south-
east coast of Australia, and was first known to Europeans as Van Dieman’s
Land. Tasmania has had a dark and difficult history. Its settlement by Europeans
in the first half of the nineteenth century, settlement based in the island’s role as a
place of banishment and exile, was accompanied by the destruction of the original
Aboriginal population as a direct consequence of that settlement. The convict in-
dustry that was the mainstay of the island’s early development included a system
of harsh and often brutal treatment that led to misery and death for many. Not only
have subsequent public debates within the island often been determined by the ever-
present spectre of the past (including, for instance, the debate about the legalization
of sodomy referred to by the Tasmanian essayist, geographer, and poet Pete Hay in
the passage quoted above), but those spectres seemed to return with a vengeance
when, in 1996, at the site of the main convict settlement at Port Arthur (which
had become a set of ‘picturesque’ ruins popular for picnics and family outings), 35
people were shot dead and 37 injured in a single horrendous killing spree—the Port
Arthur Massacre.2
Hay argues that the failure to acknowledge the suffering that has taken place in
the island—the denial of the past and the refusal of memory—has also contributed
to a loss of meaning for Tasmanians. Such a loss of meaning takes the form of an
inability to shape a proper sense of one’s own identity and place in the world or to
reconstitute a sense of self that allows an adequate recognition of what has gone be-
fore as well as a genuine capacity to act productively in the face of what is to come.
Here recognition of suffering appears as the key to the constitution of meaning, and
to a proper sense of history and futurity. Yet might time itself, or perhaps better, the

2 
The man was Martin Bryant, later condemned to life imprisonment in Hobart’s Risdon jail.
2  Suffering, Compassion, and the Possibility of a Humane Politics 11

sense of lived time at issue in the idea of history (time as worked out in concrete
places and lives), stand in a special relation to suffering? Can there be suffering,
human suffering, without time, without memory, without history?
In the now-classic definition advanced by Eric Cassell, suffering is said to be
‘a state of severe distress associated with events that threaten the intactness of the
person’ (Cassell 1982, p. 639). As he emphasizes elsewhere, ‘What is threatened
or injured [in suffering] is the intactness of the person as a person’ (Cassell 2004,
p. 274). Suffering is thus not to be simply identified with physical pain, nor, Cas-
sell argues, can it be understood on the basis of any bifurcation of the human into
different domains, bodily and mental, natural and cultural, physical and spiritual.
The notion of the person encompasses all of these, and cannot be decomposed into
them—it is a concept of personhood as essentially holistic.
The emphasis in Cassell’s definition on suffering as a form of distress that is di-
rectly related to one’s sense of personhood, itself suggests a connection to the idea
of memory, time, and history, since the person would seem to be formed precisely
through the working out of time in relation to place and to person, through a sense
of history, both personal and communal. In fact, Cassell himself makes a direct con-
nection to time, writing that ‘it follows, then, that suffering has a temporal element.
For a situation to be a source of suffering, it must influence the person’s percep-
tion of future events’3—events, one might add, that relate to that person, and their
capacity to remain intact as a person, hence it is not time alone that is at issue here,
but time as it is involved in a genuine sense of the personal, and as it contributes to
the formation of the person. Moreover, while Cassell emphasizes the future here,
neither is it the case that what is implicated is only futural time. To have a grasp of
the future is to have a grasp of the past, as well as the present, and this, indeed, is
what it is to have a grasp of time. Futurity is thus bound up with memory, as well as
with current activity and affectivity.
In this respect, and although he himself does not develop the point in this way,
Cassell’s reference to time suggests an immediate connection with contemporary
narrative accounts of personhood, particularly as worked out in the work of such as
Paul Ricoeur (1992). Indeed, while Ricoeur does not specifically address the issue
of human suffering, his account of personhood almost exactly dovetails with that to
be found in Cassell. Similarly holistic in orientation, and refusing the dichotomies
of conventional philosophical analyses, Ricoeur understands human persons as
formed through the complex interweaving of elements that occurs primarily in and
through narrative—and narrative itself cannot be divorced from the temporal and
the historical. The formation of personhood is thus the formation of a sense of self,
of the sense of a life, as that is shaped in the constant formation and reformation
of accounts of past and future. Something like such an account may also be seen
to be invoked in Hay’s comments above—although in his case, the connection at
issue encompasses, not only the relation between the temporal and the personal, but
also the way in which collective identity and community, with which the personal
is itself implicated, has an essentially temporal element, such that the collective

3 
Cassell (2004, p. 35).
12 J. Malpas

suppression of memory may create problems for the collective ability to act in the
present and project into the future, as well as for the personal.
Narrative accounts of personhood typically emphasize the relational character of
the person. Not only does this mean that persons are constituted through the relat-
ing of the parts of a life, but also that the life of the person is itself formed through
the relating of persons, and the relating of persons to the entities and events that
surround them and with which they are already engaged. One of the ways in which
this idea can be expressed is in the form of an emphasis on the character of persons,
and of human lives, as formed always in and through the places in which persons
are shaped and in which human lives are lived. Since places themselves carry within
them a strongly narrative structure—places are not static containers, but are instead
dynamic openings of action and movement—so the complex holistic and relational
character of personhood is mirrored in the complexity of place. Indeed, the relation
between person and place can be seen to exemplify the same holistic and dynamic
character: places are shaped by human interaction with them, while human lives are
shaped by those places. There is no absolute priority to place over person or person
over place, and each can be understood only as worked out in relation to the other
(Malpas 1999).
The relationality of the person, and the essential interconnection of personal
life with a larger inter-personal and worldly context, means that we can never
completely separate ourselves from those around us, nor indeed from the places
in which we find ourselves and the entities and events in those places. If we are to
think about this in temporal terms, we might say that what this means is that the
experience of temporality, and perhaps the very idea of time (bound up as it is, in
human terms, with structures of narrativity that give form and content to both past
and future), is never an experience separated from the experience of the world, or
from the engagement with others. Temporality, properly understood (which means
understood as more than merely the passage of a series of discrete moments), al-
ways takes us to a greater or lesser extent outside of ourselves, always connects us
to frameworks of meaning that implicate ourselves with others as they also differ-
entiate us from others—that give us a sense of identity and commonality, that give
a place and orientation to our lives—but in so doing also enable our lives as such.
On this account, even our own suffering can never be completely removed from
the suffering of others. Not only does our suffering implicate others, but the suffer-
ing of others also implicates us. At least, this is so just insofar as meaning can be
attached to such suffering, and insofar as the experience of suffering forces us to
attend to the meaningful character of our lives, and to the interdependence of our
lives with others. There is a reverse side to this, however, in that if, as in Cassell’s
characterization, human suffering is indeed to be understood as occurring in the
face of a threat to the intactness of the person, then suffering must also threaten
the very relationality that is constitutive of persons—both the internal relationality
of the person and the integrally connected relationality of the person to the wider
context in which the life of the person is formed and shaped. The experience of suf-
fering can thus be characterized, not only in terms of the experience of an imminent
2  Suffering, Compassion, and the Possibility of a Humane Politics 13

breakdown in one’s sense of personhood, but more than this, as the experience of an
imminent breakdown in one’s sense of the world.
Suffering is always borne by the singular individual, but that does not mean that
it remains the individual’s alone. The singularity of suffering is thus not incompat-
ible with the temporality of suffering according to which suffering, while directly
connected with the sense of personhood, always implicates more than just the indi-
vidual who suffers. What I have referred to as the temporality of suffering is itself
tied to the way in which suffering, while it threatens the intactness of the person,
is also tied to the character of the person as formed through the complex narratives
that connect persons to themselves, to other persons, and to the world. Suffering
threatens just that connectedness. The connectedness of persons does not, however,
entail a dissolution of the person into mere connections or relations. The person
remains, but their being as a person is not given only through the way in which they
are differentiated from other persons through the qualities or properties that pertain
to them—there are no such qualities or properties that mark us out as somehow
unique in relation to others, since such qualities or properties are themselves consti-
tuted in and through our relations with others.
If we recognize the temporality of suffering, then we must also recognize the
way in which suffering extends beyond the individual. The recognition of suf-
fering, and the experience of compassion (which is not to experience the same
suffering as the one who suffers, although it may entail a suffering with), are cor-
relative with one another. Thus while suffering may threaten the integrity of the
self, the recognition of suffering is also a recognition of the being of others, and
so opens up the possibility of a felt relation with others (which is true compas-
sion). Suffering may be singular, but compassion, with which it is conjoined, is
always double.
Yet if suffering threatens a breakdown in the intactness of the person, then the
refusal to recognize the suffering of others represents a double threat: it is a refusal
to acknowledge the persons who bear that suffering, and a refusal to recognize them
as persons (no matter how implicit that refusal might be), but in addition, it is a
refusal to recognize our own connectedness to those persons, and so is a refusal of
our own personhood, our own being human, as it is formed in and by that relation.
Where the suffering at issue is a suffering with which we are ourselves implicated,
even if the implication is historically mediated through our common belonging to
a place, then the refusal at issue is a refusal of our own identity, and so also has the
potential to compromise our own being as persons. This is why, in Hay’s account,
the attitude Tasmanians take to their past, and to the past suffering that has left its
marks on the island, is intimately tied to the way in which Tasmanians engage with
themselves, and so with their own sense of personhood, with their own being as
human. Put in terms of the temporal (which is more than a matter of time alone),
we might say that recognizing the temporality of suffering, which is tied to the very
recognition of suffering as suffering, is also to open oneself, in varying degrees, to
the sufferings of others.
14 J. Malpas

Suffering and the Singularity of the Person

The fifth paragraph of chapter four in the ‘Sanhedrin’ of the Mishnah declares that, for the
Justice of God, he who kills a single man destroys the world; if there is no plurality, he who
annihilated all men would be no more guilty than the primitive and solitary Cain, which is
orthodox, nor more universal in his destruction, which can be magic. I believe that is true.
The tumultuous general catastrophes – fires, wars, epidemics – are but a single sorrow, illu-
sorily multiplied in many mirrors. That is Bernard Shaw’s judgment when he states ( Guide
to Socialism, 86) that what one person can suffer is the maximum that can be suffered on
earth. If one person dies of starvation, he will suffer all the starvation that has been or will
be. If ten thousand other persons die with him, he will not be ten thousand times hungrier
nor will he suffer ten thousand times longer. There is no point in being overwhelmed by the
appalling total of human suffering; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is
accumulable. (Borges 1964, p. 178)

The idea for which Borges argues in the above passage appears in many different
places (and not only those that Borges himself catalogues). It is an idea that need not
be taken to diminish the horror of suffering on a mass scale, but can rather be taken
to direct attention to the singularity of suffering. The way this appears in Borges
is, of course, that there can be no more suffering for the many than there can be for
the one, but perhaps another way of putting the point is to say that there cannot be
suffering of the many without the suffering of the one. Suffering is always borne by
individual human beings, and to recognize suffering is to recognize the suffering of
individuals, and not merely of the mass. Suffering, we may say, is always singular.
Could we conceive of suffering that was not the suffering of an individual? To
say that we can conceive of the sufferings of a society, a nation, or of a people is not
necessarily to say that we can therefore conceive of a mode of suffering that is other
than the suffering of individuals. Indeed, very often to talk in this way is already to
presuppose the idea of a common mode of identity, shared among individuals, that
enables each of them, to a greater or lesser extent, to understand their own identity
as bound up with that of the larger whole to which they take themselves to belong,
and to understand the trials that may afflict the many as also, therefore, a burden
borne by each individual. To talk of the suffering of a society, a nation, or a people
may thus be taken not as an alternative mode of suffering, but as one of the ways in
which individuals may suffer—through the harms that befall the larger communi-
ties to which they belong.
To emphasize the singularity of suffering is not the same as merely adopting a
generalized individualism as against some form of collectivism. What is at issue
here is not a question concerning a choice of ontologies, but instead concerns the
character of suffering as itself directly related to the very character of human being,
to the character of personhood, to the being of the self. Just as it is the integrity of
the person or the self that is threatened in the face of suffering, so it is also the per-
son or the self—this one—that suffers. One might argue that the singularity of suf-
fering is a specific instance of the singularity, perhaps even the uniqueness, of the
person. Uniqueness, however, is almost certainly the wrong term to use here, since
it is all too readily associated with ideas of a uniqueness given in some special qual-
ity or set of qualities, in a uniqueness of personality or character. For the most part,
2  Suffering, Compassion, and the Possibility of a Humane Politics 15

human beings are not so different from one another, and it is hard to see why we
should focus merely on some abstract concept of the ‘unique’ as that which marks
out persons as persons. The singularity of the person does not derive from anything
that belongs to one person over another—it is, in fact, more a point of commonality
than of simple difference. Instead, singularity belongs to the very nature of person-
hood so that to be a person is to be singular, while singularity is, one might say,
most fully realized in the person. This is why suffering, as distinct from almost any
of the other affections or activities of human being, is itself singular in character,
since it is in suffering that the being of the person, the intactness of the self, is itself
directly threatened—the singularity of suffering is a direct correlate to the absolute
singularity of personal being.4
One of the most powerful, although also perhaps the most difficult, evocations
of personhood in English literature is to be found in the famous passage in Shake-
speare’s Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare 2007) in which Shylock challenges his
Christian persecutors:
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affec-
tions, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same
diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer,
as a Christian is? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you prick us, do we not bleed? And if
you wrong us, shall we not revenge? (Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 1)

On the one hand Shylock can here be seen to be drawing attention to a set of at-
tributes that belong to Jews, of whom Shylock is one, and that they also share with
Christians—the possession of certain bodily parts, certain capacities, dispositions,
dependencies and vulnerabilities. On the other hand, the power of this passage de-
rives from the fact that it is not some faceless representative, even if of a particular
religion and culture, who speaks here, but this singular human being, who draws at-
tention, to his own singular capacity to suffer, and in bringing attention to this, to his
own singular being as a person, and so as one whose being can never completely be
taken up under any of the appellations that may be applied to him, whether as Jew or
Christian. In his own standing before us as this one who suffers, Shylock also makes
a demand on us for a recognition of that suffering, and for a recognition of his own
being as one who, when his suffering is unrecognized, may seek to impose suffering
on others—the latter being itself an expression of the relationality of personhood in
a manner as unlooked-for, at least to modern eyes, as it is awful.
The singularity of suffering is not incompatible with the temporality of suffer-
ing that was evident in the discussion above. The temporality of suffering is tied

4 
While the connection is not made explicit in the text, the account of personhood that is presented
here clearly resonates with the account of the ethical relation to be found in the work of Emmanuel
Levinas—particularly in its emphasis on the singularity of the ethical relation and its character
as given in the face-to-face encounter with another—see, for instance, Levinas (1969). Although
there are important features of the Levinasian account that are replicated here, there are also as-
pects of Levinas’ approach that I would contest—particularly his emphasis on the ethical relation
as preceding anything ontological. In fact, on the account sketched here, and also I would argue in
Levinas’ own account (in spite of his own claims to the contrary), the ethical and the ontological
converge: ethics is ontology and any adequate ontology is also an ethics.
16 J. Malpas

to the way in which suffering, while it threatens the intactness of the person, is
also tied to the character of the person as formed through the complex narratives
that connect persons to themselves, to other persons, and to the world. Suffering
threatens just that connectedness. Yet the connectedness of persons does not imply
that persons are nothing but concatenations of connections or relations. Persons
are constituted through the complex relations in which they participate, and yet it
is precisely through such relationality that persons emerge as single entities—as
beings who have a sense of their own being as persons, and not merely as persons
in some generic sense, but as persons for whom their being as persons matters to
them. It is thus that suffering emerges as a possible mode of such being—suffering
is what occurs in the face of an imminent threat to one’s being as a person, and so
also to one’s own singularity.
What I have been calling the ‘temporality’ of personhood thus encompasses a
sense of the person as both relational and singular. Similarly, while suffering is
always borne by the individual, suffering does not remain the individual’s alone. As
was already evident in the discussion above, once we recognize the temporality of
suffering, then we must also recognize the way in which suffering extends beyond
the individual. To have a sense of personhood cannot only be to have a sense of
oneself as a person, but requires, instead, a sense of participation and involvement
with other persons. But recognizing others as person also means recognizing their
singularity as persons, and their capacity to suffer as persons. Moreover, the singu-
larity of suffering and of personhood means that the recognition of suffering is not a
recognition merely of some set of objectively specifiable responses. Recognition of
suffering must involve a recognition, a felt sense even, of the singularity of the one
who suffers, and so the singularity of that suffering. Suffering and compassion are
thus, as I noted above, essentially conjoined.
If suffering is always singular, then when we look to the suffering of the many,
presented not in terms of the suffering of any single individual, but only in the
suffering of a population, in the suffering of numbers, it may well be that such
suffering will no longer present itself to us as suffering. This is not because such a
mode of presentation lacks the same emotional impact—even though it may well
be less emotionally confronting—but rather that there is no suffering in numbers
alone, only in those who suffer. Who suffers is not a number, not a population, but a
singular human being—even when there are many such. Borges tells us that ‘there
is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human suffering’. Not
only is there no point, but to be overwhelmed in that way is to lose one’s own sense
of the suffering that is at issue—it is to be overwhelmed by a multiplicity that does
not itself reflect the genuine suffering undergone. If we wish to avoid the reality of
suffering, if we do not wish to be moved to recognize our own implication in such
suffering, then perhaps we need do no more than turn our attention away from the
individual and on to the mass, the population, the number. It is perhaps for this
reason that we can remain relatively insensitive to the suffering of a million no less
than of a thousand or a hundred. For when we look at suffering in this way, the real
fact of suffering all but disappears. Not only, then, is suffering not increased through
the multiplication of those who suffer, but suffering is also removed from us, ren-
2  Suffering, Compassion, and the Possibility of a Humane Politics 17

dered in a form that no longer makes the same demands upon us, perhaps no longer
gives rise to the same compassion.

Suffering and a Humane Politics

The end of the movement of absurdity, or rebellion etc, and consequently the end of the
contemporary world, is compassion in the original meaning of the word, that is to say, in
the last analysis, love and poetry. (Camus 1966, p. 103)

Albert Camus’ politics and ethics of rebellion—an ethics and politics that emerges
at its strongest in his writing after the end of the Second World War, and especially
in his writings on the Algerian situation—is an ethics based on a simple idea: the
absolute refusal of human suffering. Already this idea is clear in a passage from
The Plague in which Camus presents his own unequivocal answer to the question
that appears in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: can any amount of good
be justified if it depends on the suffering of one innocent human being? Camus
describes a scene in which the novel’s main protagonist, the doctor Rieux, has just
attended the tortured death from plague of a young girl. When the priest who is
with him offers what is intended to be the consoling advice that the divine order
that allows the girl’s death and suffering cannot be understood but must simply be
loved, Rieux angrily replies: ‘I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying
day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture’
(Camus 1960, p. 178).
The response that Rieux, and through him, Camus, makes here can be seen, not
only to be based on the conception of human suffering as an absolute evil, one that
is not able to be mitigated even by the role it may play in some larger divine order,
but as also embodying a recognition of the singular character of suffering. If suf-
fering is not multiplied by the multiplication of those who suffer, then neither is
suffering reduced by the reduction of those who suffer—not even if the suffering
at issue is reduced from the suffering of an entire world to the suffering of a single
child. Rieux’s refusal of what is put to him by the priest should not be construed as
directed only against suffering as it might be taken to be ordained by God. It is as
much a rejection of any order that issues from human beings as from the divine. ‘I
shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture’, Rieux
says, and when we read this in conjunction with Camus’ explorations elsewhere,
we know that this means a refusal willingly to go along with any ordering of the
world in which suffering is not itself refused and in which it is not struggled against.
Camus’ philosophy of rebellion is thus above all a rebellion against suffering—a
rebellion against our own suffering and against the suffering we may impose on oth-
ers—a rebellion in which Camus rejects the roles both of victim and of executioner.5
If what Camus refuses is indeed any scheme of things ‘in which children are put
to torture’, then what he refuses is the very scheme of things that we find in the con-

5 
See Camus (2005) written shortly after the end of the Second World War, and originally pub-
lished in 1946 in the Resistance newspaper Combat.
18 J. Malpas

temporary world. The scheme of things that operates in the world in which we now
live is indeed one that involves the torture of children, as well as of adults, even if it
is a torture enacted, not only through violence and war, but through poverty, starva-
tion, exploitation, and disease. It is, moreover, a torture that is a direct consequence
of decisions and policies taken by politicians and governments around the world—a
torture in which we are ourselves implicated through our participation in an eco-
nomic and social order that not only allows, but is often predicated upon, the exis-
tence of inequality and injustice (one need only think of the use of child labour to
produce goods for Western markets to see to what extent this is so). In this respect,
the use of torture as an instrument in the so-called ‘war against terror’ by nations
such as the United States and the United Kingdom can be seen as an expression of
a deeper willingness to use suffering as an instrument of policy, as an instrument of
governance, a deeper willingness to participate in a scheme of things in which what
matters is not the singularity of the person, but the generalized interest of the nation,
the financial elite, the government of the day, the globalized corporation.
The singularity of suffering is directly tied to the singular character of personal,
which is to say, human being. Camus’ refusal of suffering can thus also be seen
to rest on a recognition of the singularity of the human, and to itself constitute an
assertion of the human—an assertion, even, of the dignity of the human (Malpas
2007).6 Yet the position that Camus exemplifies here, a position to which we seem
to be led by precisely the reasoning set out in the pages above, also seems to present
us with an impossible situation. On the one hand, the singularity of suffering means
that suffering can never allow of being quantified across persons—can never allow
of the possibility of balancing the suffering of one individual against the diminution
of suffering among some greater mass of individuals. Moreover, to treat suffering
only in terms of the suffering of the mass is already to overlook the genuine char-
acter of suffering, is already to turn away from suffering, and so also, to turn away
from a genuine recognition of the human. On the other hand, it seems to be precisely
in the nature of that mode of decision-making associated with the governmental
and the political that it should not concern itself with the single individual, but
only with the collective, the group, the mass. Thus, within even liberal, democratic
polities, decision-making routinely deploys utilitarian calculations that allow suf-
fering to appear only in terms of the statistics that characterize a population, while
such quantified levels of suffering are considered merely as elements within larger
calculative frames.
On the face of it, the conclusion to which are driven here is that the idea of
a genuinely human politics, a genuinely humane mode of government, is truly a
chimera, since it would require stitching together two radically different modes of
engagement with the world and with the fact of human suffering. It would seem to
require a mode of politics, a mode of government, that acknowledges the singular-

6 
On the nature of dignity, and the manner of its relation to concepts of the human, as well as to
the relational understanding developed here, see the discussions contained in the volume to which
this is a successor, Malpas and Lickiss (2007) including my own essay in that volume, ‘Human
Dignity and Human Being’.
2  Suffering, Compassion, and the Possibility of a Humane Politics 19

ity of human being, and yet is also geared to that which goes beyond the singular,
that pertains to the collective, and to the mass; a mode of politics, a mode of gov-
ernment, that refuses to allow the quantification of human suffering as one of the
methods and instruments of operation, and yet nevertheless continues to operate at
the level of the quantified and the generic.7
It may well be that the difficulty that appears here is one that is fundamental
to any politics and to any mode of government. Yet it would surely be a mistake
to therefore consign politics and the practice of government to the realm of the
inhumane, if for no other reason than that it would itself constitute an acceptance
of a form of inhumanity. Camus’ position is not one that draws back from political
engagement, even if it is an engagement that often remains purely critical. At the
very least, what has to be recognized is the danger that is always present within a
purely political or governmental frame—the danger that such a frame will lead us
away from the realities of human life and suffering, to an obscuring of the singular
nature of the human, and so to a mode of operation that may well turn out to be a
denial of the human.
More than just this, however, any mode of political or governmental practice
that aspires to retain a sense of the human and potentially humane character of such
practice must always remain open and responsive to the challenge that can be made
on the basis of the singular character of the human, and that constantly confronts
the anonymity of the political and the governmental with the singular reality of the
sufferings of individuals. Such responsiveness to the fact of suffering need not im-
ply that we can always exercise a power sufficient to relieve suffering—but it does
imply a refusal simply to accept it, and a need constantly to find ways to address it.
In this respect, it is not the need to judge fairly between different interests, or to find
just means to allocate finite resources that gives rise to inhumanity, but rather the
development of systems of political and governmental decision-making and modes
of administrative organization that operate according to what is effectively a calcu-
lus of human suffering in which suffering becomes almost an instrument of policy.
There must always exist a tension within modes of political and governmental
operation between their grounding in the realities of human life, and so in the singu-

7 
One might argue, in addition, that the insistence on the refusal of suffering of the sort found in
Camus can never be satisfied—is not to live already to be enmeshed in a system that involves
suffering as an inevitable part of it?—and enjoins us to do what cannot be done. The refusal of
suffering cannot mean, however, that we are committed to the attempt to eradicate every instance
of suffering by our own efforts nor can it mean that we should refuse our own lives (rather as Scho-
penhauer, but not Camus, argued that the only properly ethical course available was the suicide of
the ascetic who simply ceases to will the means to live). Not only would such courses of action
fail to achieve their ends, but they are more likely to contribute to suffering rather than diminish it.
What the refusal of suffering requires, more than anything else, is a willingness to take seriously
the singularity of our own lives, as well as the singularity of those whose lives connect with our
own, and to act in ways that are attentive to that singularity, within the capacities available to us
and in a way that accords with our own situation. Camus’ own position is one that stands against
excess—whether the excess of the one who does nothing or of the one who attempts to do every-
thing. What is absolutely refused is the turning away from the singular, the concrete and the lived
that is the necessary accompaniment of all forms of excess.
20 J. Malpas

larity of the human, and the demands of their ever-widening spheres of operation, as
well as the collective interest that they appear to serve. The danger of our contem-
porary situation is that this tension has been exacerbated almost to breaking point
by the increasing dominance of modes of organization and decision-making that
belong to a technology of governance based around the quantifiable, the measur-
able, and the manipulable.8 Within this frame the very singularity of the human, and
of human suffering, seems indeed almost completely to have disappeared. Nowhere
is this more evident than in the transformation, within all manner of public and pri-
vate institutions, of singular individuals, into customers, clients, consumers—even
the vocabulary of the citizen has now become one that transforms us from acting,
deliberating persons, into elements within a system of electoral obligation and civic
accountability.9
I began this discussion with the observation that the refusal to recognize suf-
fering may contribute to a loss of identity, to a loss of a proper sense of the past as
well as the future, to a loss of a proper sense of our own humanity. The refusal to
recognize suffering, which is always a refusal to recognize the singularity of suf-
fering, is thus not some form of particular and limited blindness that affects only a
part of our functioning as human beings, but is instead corrupting of the singular
relationality that is itself determinative of who and what we are. To the extent that
contemporary modes of politics and governance embody such a refusal of suffering
within their very modes of operation, then to that same extent they also function
as corrupting of any proper sense of the human, as cutting us off from an ability to
engage with ourselves, with others, and with the world. The challenge, then, and it
is a challenge whose answer will always remain difficult and perhaps even obscure,
is to find ways in which the machinery of contemporary life, a machinery that seems
itself to include human suffering as part of its very mechanism, can be redirected,
reconfigured, redesigned so as to enable the human to reappear within it, to enable
a properly humane politics, to enable a politics in which suffering is not accepted,
but constantly and steadfastly refused. Such a conclusion may well be viewed as a
nothing more than a naïve idealism that is incapable of facing up to the pragmatic
realities of things. But one can have too little idealism as well as too much. If the

8 
The tension that is evident here is apparent in many aspects of contemporary organizations,
and particularly organizations whose primary concern is human welfare—organizations concerned
with matters of social welfare, health, and education. It is significant that not only does this tension
have an impact on those whose welfare is supposed to be the focus of such organizations, but also
on those who work within the organizations in question. Thus Thomas R. Cole and Nathan Carlin,
for instance, have written of ‘the suffering of physicians’ as this arises due to the way in which
medical practitioners increasingly find themselves unable to live up to the ideals and obligations of
their profession because of the limits imposed by the organizational situations in which they find
themselves—see Cole and Carlin (2009). The ‘dehumanization’ of medicine to which Cole and
Carlin refer is, I would argue, directly linked to the inability of contemporary medical policy and
modes of organization to respond to the singularity of suffering.
9 
The work of Michel Foucault provides us with a detailed elaboration of the rise of what he
referred to as ‘bio-power’—a shift in the character of governmental operation towards the man-
agement not of individuals, but of populations, a shift made possible because of the rise of new
actuarial practices and managerial techniques. See, for instance, Foucault (1976).
2  Suffering, Compassion, and the Possibility of a Humane Politics 21

demands of the pragmatic are indeed such as to require that we give up a capacity
for human responsiveness, then the cost of such pragmatism is surely more than we
should ever be willing to pay.

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