The Dialectics of Suffering: Social Pathologies and the Tasks of Critical Theory

Obstacles to emancipation were described by critical theorists via different concepts, such as alienation, reification, and exploitation. More recently, the analogy to medical-psychological vocabulary – present in the notion of “social pathologies” – has gained importance, and the work of Axel Honneth has remarkably contributed to this tendency. However, while this terminology is ubiquitous in his work, its meaning varies over time. In Honneth’s early writings, social pathologies are obstacles to individual self-realization, which are perceived as painful. Suffering, then, is taken as a symptom of social pathologies, offering, at the same time, a motivation for resistance. From the 2000s on, however, there is a systematic blockage in this motivational connection in Honneth’s diagnosis, and social pathologies are identified no longer with the causes of suffering, but rather with the erosion of the motivational aspect of experienced suffering. A social situation is pathological, then, not because it entails suffering, but rather because social actors, although suffering, do not feel compelled to articulate this experience and to collectively struggle against its causes. Honneth now diagnoses, in a way that brings him in some respects closer to Adorno, widespread experiences of indeterminacy, such as loneliness, depression and emptiness over those of disrespect and misrecognition. This notion of social pathology suggests that the complete suppression of suffering should not be the aim of critical theory, whose goal would lie, rather, in contributing to more fruitful and democratic ways of dealing with social suffering.

Although this more sophisticated view of social pathologies overcomes most of the difficulties posed by Honneth’s earlier formulation, it nonetheless retains a decisive problematic feature: the downplaying of structural relations of domination that produce very different kinds of suffering among different social groups. I will indicate, finally, how “peripheral” perspectives have developed insights that productively address this issue.