Pain is Without Why. The (Non)Sense of Suffering After the Shoah

The principium 'reddendae rationis' holds in the case of pain, insofar as we seek its reason, but not for pain, insofar as pain stands alone, without reason. The suffering of the righteous, like Job, cannot be reconciled with either retributive or theophanic reasons. Job embodies the ex-cess of evil, i.e., the stranger to the justificatory logic of guilt-punishment or pain-election. The absurdity of pain breaks theodicy. Kant first demonstrates both the theoretical weakness of theodicy and the impossibility of integrating suffering in an order and in a meaningful sense. As Levinas suggests, the disproportion between suffering and theodicy was shown at Auschwitz, where suffering reveals itself as “useless.” In the camps, any justification of evil reveals its fragility, its inhumanity as well as its immorality. After the Shoah, what remains of the experience of pain is an ethical demand: we should take responsibility for the suffering of the other, rather than let them suffer alone.