A Hierarchy of Suffering: Lebanon, Hegel, and Northern Expatriates Search for Recognition

Abstract

Despite more wealth and material extraction than ever before, modernity still consists of widespread poverty and suffering. The widespread continued inequality of today has led the world to suffer. This suffering is related to a proximity to possession of material, and conflicts predicated on a competition for proximity. This suffering, as with trauma in general, has withdrawn people further into notions of identity. These identities, in the positivist world of today, are taken to be stagnant and wholly representative. Trauma and suffering have come to define the identities of people around the world; in a rush to locate and organize identities, there is a drive to create a hierarchy of privilege and suffering. This hierarchy of suffering is a zero-sum game of stagnating identity and comparing traumas. Comparing traumas as a reflection of difference serves to further the I from the Other. This retreat further into the particular of identity is at the cost of a vindictive oscillation back onto difference. With this retreat, society comes to form smaller groups of identity progressively more alone in fear and paranoia.

The perpetual retreat of identity back into itself is representative of a perpetual mis-identity and negative mode of reciprocity that sustains it. George Hegel and his use of dialectics locate this reciprocity and attempt to trace a solution. However, it’s clear that his philosophy has not inspired the progress and solutions of the ‘universal history’ it envisioned. In the capitalist hegemony of today, dialectics and Hegel’s social ontology still have a lot to offer us; the question is how to apply them. Whether it be the emancipation of ‘universal history’, or a better mediated tomorrow, a dialectical conception of identity and difference can be used to enact a reflexive attitude of perception that is core to better understanding both historical experiences and its traumas. Using autoethnography, this paper uses narrative on time spent in Beirut, Lebanon–a place of both myriad identities and great inequality– as a vessel for exploring these themes.