Secularization of pain reflects changed sensibilities, not mere disenchantment

Evidence

In this example the secularization of pain signals not merely the abandonment of a transcendental language (“religious obsessions”) but the shift to a new preoccupation—from the personal attempt at consoling and curing (that is, inhabiting a social relationship) to a distanced attempt at investigating the functions and sensations of the living body. Pain is in- flicted in systematic fashion on animals in order to understand its physiological basis. So on the one hand we have pain inhabiting a discourse between patient and physician; on the other, pain is the reading made through experimental observation in a context where—as de Certeau noted—language has become de-ontologized. It is this latter model that informs Enlightenment skepticism toward the shaman’s curative claims (mixed up as they are with ecstatic displays and “inspiration” by invisible spirits) and helps to constitute the secular domain of physiological knowledge through written reports of experimental results. The contrast is not properly described in terms of “disenchantment” when what is at stake are different patterns of sensibility about pain, and different ways of objectifying it. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 234

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEFINE: Reframes ‘disenchantment’ (Weber’s Entzauberung) as an inadequate description for what shifts when pain becomes an object of experimental study rather than spiritual encounter.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s chapter on silence/sound where secularization of experience is likewise framed as changing sensibility patterns rather than rational disenchantment.

Related

• Secularization of pain shifted attention from consoling relationships to detached investigation (similarity 0.92)
• Pain is a mode of living a relationship, not merely a passive bodily state. (similarity 0.82)
• Punitive pain can be actively embraced and re-signified by its recipients (similarity 0.80)
• Physical and psychological pain are not cleanly separable categories (similarity 0.79)
• Sensation and action cannot be cleanly separated in bodily experience (similarity 0.79)
• Christianity uniquely revalued suffering as valuable where antiquity did not (similarity 0.78)