We have become extraordinarily sensitive. We discover forms of suffering everywhere: in education, in the family, in language, in advertising. At the same time, we try to hide, to somehow disguise the old, unchanging forms of pain, against which we are powerless. With varying degrees of exaggeration, our society is scandalized by the most unexpected nuances of discrimination, but it doesn't know what to do, what to think, in the face of suicide. Or war. Every year, dozens of books are published everywhere offering help in overcoming suffering, with vague Stoic, pantheistic ideas, with a contrived and elusive Buddhism, or with the enthusiastic inclination, the fierce individual affirmation, typical of the "American religion"; and many more are published to denounce, to demand reforms, to lament injustices and afflictions of all kinds, and to suggest—like Saint-Just—that we must suppress pain. Any pain. What I am interested in studying is our "culture of suffering," that is, the set of ideas and beliefs through which we interpret suffering in modern Western societies, the language or languages ​​in which we talk about suffering.