Intentional affectivity directed at pain differs from pure body-consciousness

Evidence

When we say that someone is suffering, we commonly suppose that he or she is not an agent. To suffer (physical or mental pain, humiliation, deprivation) is, so we usually think, to be in a passive state—to be an object, not a subject. One readily allows that pain may be a cause for action (seeking to end the suffering, say), but one does not normally think of it as action itself. Pain is something that happens to the body or that afflicts the mind. Or so, at any rate, we tend to think. Yet one can think of pain not merely as a passive state (although it can be just that) but as itself agentive. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 385 (#expands, via linked claim)

Th us understood, aff ectivity is not added to perceptual things retrospectively but is constituted together with their very presence, their being (EN, 650–52; BN, 770–72). Valueless theoretical objects are abstractions having a constitutive basis in primary aff ective objects. Th is means that the idea of a perception that would present the material object as pure extension and form, free of all aff ectivity, is an intellectual construct. Aff ectivity is not projected onto purely material objects of perception— there are no such objects— but aff ec tivity is constituted together with materiality itself. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 358 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Thus pain does not simply constitute irrefutable evidence of the corporeal ground of experience, it is also a way of constituting the epistemological status of “the body.” — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 447 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Pain can be agentive rather than merely a passive state — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 385; Pain can be embraced as passionate engagement rather than calculated means; Pain can be engaged through learned structuration rather than given meaning (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Pain can be agentive rather than merely a passive state #expands (0.85) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 385
• Affectivity is inseparable from materiality in Sartrean perception #corroborates (0.82) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 358
• Pain partially constitutes the body’s epistemological and moral status. #expands (0.80) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 447
• Pain can be embraced as passionate engagement rather than calculated means #expands (0.78)
• Pain can be engaged through learned structuration rather than given meaning #expands (0.75)
• Husserl reconciled affective perception with transcendental constitution by positing two levels of activity #responds-to (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 354