Pain can function as an active force, not merely passivity.

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. … 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

• XREF: Connects to vaulted Cooper/Christian thread: Christianity’s redemptive valuing of suffering-as-agentive is exactly the kind of religious residue that secular frameworks (agent-vs-victim binary) must suppress.