Ritual suffering lets participants extend their selves by undergoing predetermined agony.

Evidence

Ritual drama, such as the Passion of Christ or the Martyrdom of Hussain, has an added dimension. Participants here enact, identify with, undergo, the predetermined agony of figures in Christian and Islamic narratives. In subjecting themselves to suffering (in some cases to self-inflicted wounds) they seek in part to extend themselves as subjects. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 378

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to vaulted title interest ‘Small acts of decorum toward corpses’: both take embodied, scripted self-subjection — here to narrative agony — as identity-making rather than self-loss, again challenging the interior-autonomous secular self.