Pain can be agentive rather than merely a passive state

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

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Overturns a deep-seated Western assumption that suffering and agency are mutually exclusive, with broad implications for ethics, law, and testimony.
• XREF: Relates to ritual sacrifice and self-inflicted suffering in the reader’s sacrifice article. — connects to: Intentional affectivity directed at pain differs from pure body-consciousness; Absorbed activity makes pain present yet un-noticed until reflection.; Erotic pain expresses a desire for union, not passive enslavement — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1005
• SEED: Article angle: how recognizing pain as agentive (self-inflicted suffering, martyrdom, asceticism) undoes the secular victim/agent binary that modern politics relies on.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 385