I am reading a book about illness narratives and the last five things I’ve written as marginalia are just ‘Eww.’ Not at anything gross for bodily reasons but because of statements that the primary purpose of suffering is pedagogical.

Mapping pedagogy as a moral responsibility onto the meaninglessness of pain and suffering attempts to make it ‘useful’ and potentially justifies its continuing. Or constructs it as part of a redemptive narrative when no redemption was necessary.

Pain and suffering are pain and suffering. They are not a ‘lesson’. They are random and chaotic and a routine part of having a human body that needs to be better integrated into our ida of life. But they are not necessarily teachers. Nor do they involve an imperative to learn.

It’s only neoliberal narratives that start first be denying the recognition of pain and suffering as essential parts of human life and as things that arrest the forward motion of a life’s narrative that can find narratives or pain and suffering inherently pedagogical.

You first have to deny these things as part of a normal life’s story to be able to see them as revelatory. That’s not a moral pedagogy of suffering. That’s a culture that immorally and systematically represses suffering being called out/deconstructed by narrative.

You can’t ‘learn’ something that you already know but don’t want to admit because it doesn’t fit with your individualistic neoliberal ideology.