Pain is an active practical relationship that inhabits time, not raw data

Evidence

Pain, one might venture, is neither a brute reality undermining thought nor an interpretation that is the occasion of ideological or scientific elaboration. It can be an active, practical relationship inhabiting time. But surely—so it may be objected—this applies only to “mental suffering” and not to bodily pain. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 403

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The reframing of pain as ‘an active, practical relationship inhabiting time’ resists both brute-materialist and pure-interpretivist accounts — a dense synthesis worth sitting with.