on suffering and theological hope

here's a selection from an essay I recently submitted on Johann Metz's political theology.

"For Metz, the memory of human suffering cannot be reduced to “a social history of oppression,” for the writing of that history often serves as little “more than a screen against which we project our present interests.” Selective accounts of past suffering merely serve as instruments by which the present order justifies its conduct. In this moment of justification, genuinely novel anticipations of hope for the hopeless are excluded by the trajectory of emancipation drawn in the self-interested struggle. Thus, a broad memoria passionis serves to raise suspicion about society’s plausibility structures, by exposing the way in which their historical self-accounting transforms them into “obfuscation structures.” When memory keeps the absolute meaninglessness of suffering in our minds, it “gives the lie to this whole affirmative… teleology” and calls into question of “the banality of what we take to be ‘realism’.” In the process of secularization in which humanity takes over from God as being the subject of history, the responsibility and the guilt of all history seems to “fall back onto human beings themselves.” In order to avoid this, emancipation is written merely as an abstract history of success, which finally exculpates itself by turning “one’s fellow human beings into enemies.” In this zero-sum process there is no liberation from guilt, or genuine redemption, but only the temporary redistribution of power. The memory of suffering keeps the ubiquity of guilt in mind, and therefore the hope of a redemption that is not anticipated by a linear ideological history. One problem is the limitation that arises from considering “human suffering in its concreteness…[as] the starting point for proclaiming the new form of life.” Are there not goods of human flourishing that find no negative expression in suffering, such that a consideration or memory of suffering could never discover the antithetical moment that allows the positive moment to be anticipated or emerge? Perhaps at this point, an aesthetic claim is needed to complement Metz’s political fundamental claims."