Sick bodies’ suffering can be self-inflicted punishment rather than social dissent

Evidence

Yet even in Freud “resistance” is a theoretically defined concept, one that has a particular place in the work of analysis. The sick body’s suffering is not always to be read as resistance to the social power of others; it is sometimes the body’s punishment of itself for desiring what it ought not to desire. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 340

The sick body’s suffering is not always to be read as resistance to the social power of others; it is sometimes the body’s punishment of itself for desiring what it ought not to desire. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 340

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to The Soundscape work on how the body enacts cultural meaning, and to Freud’s own theory where resistance is a clinical rather than political category.
• DEEPTHINKING: Asad unpacks how anthropologists flatten Freud’s technical concept of resistance into a political-dissent metaphor, losing both its clinical specificity and the possibility that suffering is self-directed.
• DEFINE: Asad distinguishing two rival readings of bodily suffering: agency-as-resistance vs. self-punishment for forbidden desire.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 340