The sacrifice of meaning, Matthew Bowker

“Perhaps this is the absurd lesson of Job: that our choice is either to accept loss and make it meaningful or to protest it in  absurdity, which costs us our ability to mean. If we choose the former, it need not be because we are satisfied that there is a universal order or great warum that justifies our losses, but because our meaning-making power is all we have to trade, and to give it up is to sacrifice our ability to act meaningfully in the world. On the other hand, if we are to follow the example of Camus’ 1958) vaunted “fastidious assassins” who demanded self-sacrifice as the only just compensation for performing acts of terrorism, then when confronted with extraordinary inhumanity or injustice, perhaps only the sacrifice of our ability to mean is meaningful.”