Pain as bodily limit justifies the secular project of replacing pain with pleasure

Evidence

For if pain is the symptom of an afflicted body, it is first of all a limit to the body’s ability to act effectively in the “real world.” It is also the most immediate sign of thisworld, of the senses through which its materiality, external and internal, is felt—and therefore it offers a kind of vindication of the secular. A crucial point about pain, however, is that it enables the secular idea that “historymaking” and “self-empowerment” can progressively replace pain by pleasure—or at any rate, by the search for what pleases one. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 328

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that pain’s sheer immediacy as the ‘most immediate sign’ of the material world ‘vindicates’ secularity — and then enables the utopian substitution of pleasure for pain — is a dense, layered point: secularity both admits pain as proof of the real and promises its elimination, a tension worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Negativity and pain constitute genuinely human experience — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 75