Pain is a mode of living a relationship, not merely a passive bodily state.

Evidence

If research now indicates that the brain is the source and not the terminus of pain sensations, the latter can be thought of as actions that are sited at once in cultural and neurophysiological contexts. In an important sense “cultural” and “physical” cease to be dichotomies, although for analytical purposes they can be distinguished. What a subject experiences as painful, and how, are not simply mediated culturally and physically, they are themselves modes of living a relationship. The ability to live such relationships over time transforms pain from a passive experience into an active one, and thus defines one of the ways of living sanely in the world. It does not follow, of course, that one cannot or should not seek to reform the social relations one inhabits, still less that pain is intrinsically “a valuable thing.” My point is that one can live one’s pain sanely or insanely, and (although ideas about insanity change) that the progressivist model of agency diverts attention away from our trying to understand how this is done in different traditions, because of the assumption that the agent always seeks to overcome pain conceived as object and as state of passivity. The secular emphasis on the integral human body as the locus of moral sovereignty makes it difficult to grasp the idea of pain as an imagined relationship in which such “internal” states as memory and hope mediate sociality. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 410

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the prior claim that silence is a positive presence, both reframing a negative phenomenon as an active relational mode. Also resonates with Deep Listening’s treatment of sensation as relational. — connects to: Pleasure and love are intrinsically bound to cruelty and pain, not tenderness.; Erotic pain expresses a desire for union, not passive enslavement — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1005
• DEEPTHINKING: The whole passage works one dense conceptual move—dissolving the culture/body dichotomy such that pain becomes an active relationship—resisting any single-sentence summary.