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37. Competition between Victims
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37 Competition between victims esther Benbassa in comfortable Western societies, we are able to run from suffering and after success, happiness, health, and eternal youth. Though we do not say it out loud, we long for immortality, and our faith in ever-evolving progress has led us to believe in a future without suffering. yet, until recently, the monotheistic homo religiosus suffered for and by God. He believed in the redemptive function of suffering. religions , indeed, always had a penchant for the suffering of man. in it, they tried to find an explanation to make life on earth bearable. or they worked to show that suffering was not comprehensible in mortal terms. even individual suffering had a place in the collective, and collective suffering endured by the group, as a result of its past or present sins, assured it a continuity. it reaffirmed a genealogical order and prevented estrangement from one’s own. This, in spite of the fact that suffering was inexplicable, given that it descended upon the faithful and the innocent . yesterday’s suffering was a model for future generations, a way of reinforcing the group’s faith in its common fate, and of keeping the belief in God intact.1 in the Beginning, There Was suffering The history of suffering was once inseparable from that of hope in the here and now and in the beyond. By contrast, in our increasingly secular societies, suffering is a symbol for injustice; no longer does it also engender hope. But what kind of hope remains imaginable? today, redemption is an act of repentance, in which the past is revisited and the present absolved. The claims of suffering of some groups engender the repentance of others. i am speaking here of a civil repentance that compensates for innocence lost by according rights to those who have undergone unjust suffering. now, suffering has entered a sphere of competition, where groups fight for public attention and a place on the sociopolitical chessboard. This competition has in turn led to an inevitable surge in claims of suffering. The more suffering is seen as obscene, the more compensation becomes necessary to make it disappear. suffering and culpability have become so mutually supportive as to engender new forms of suffering, thereby foreclosing the possibility for new kinds of hope. suffering creates victims, and being a victim is now a moral posture that has become a contributing factor in identity formation, 473 474 | Benbassa constitutive of certain identities that, lacking in cultural transmission, feed off memories that are themselves contemporary constructions. These identities are substantively turned toward an oft-deformed vision of the past. today’s religion of suffering makes up for our estrangement from religion. our identities are increasingly founded on a kind of victimhood that posits another manner of being and existing, and connects us to a community of sufferers past and present. The twentieth century, which was a century of suffering and victims, is resurfacing and imposing a trail of much older sufferings and victims onto the present. slavery, for example, was until recently obscured from european memories and from european history generally. a kind of memory of suffering, detached from history, is thus emerging in the present, and even sometimes as a future threat. it gives meaning to our feelings of disenchantment, which are expressed with as much adamancy as our faith in happiness—an ideal rather than a plausible reality. Have we completely escaped history? Though we need history, we content ourselves with memory, with this memory that has been sorted and reformulated according to suffering. We find meaning for our future in suffering. is the suffering of our contemporaries, or rather that which they claim, limited to moral capital? in the long term, will its compassion-driven rhetoric turn out to have been but an empty tool for promoting group interests and justifying political agendas? are claims of suffering merely a new form of religion, better adapted to our needs? a religion with rights and few duties? or do we celebrate suffering as a means of constructing our present and perhaps our future? What if suffering and the reactions it provokes were the only ethics at our disposal for managing our societies overwrought and disenchanted by well-being and consumption? a kind of ethics of long-distance suffering, the suffering of others, with which we can identify without having to understand the experiences of the victims. The following kinds of ever-evoked memories, the keepers of which are sensitive to every...