Monday, September 22, 2008

Rule Of Sympathy

At the most general level, this book is about how people come to think about each other, about each other's suffering, and how people act through this sympathizing subjectivity. How is that people come to identify with another's pain, act in solidarity with others in struggle, to cooperate with others, in communities, in social movements? What is the history of this force of human cohesion? Sympathy, I will argue, was a specific form of sociality that facilitated the elaboration of various forms of power-relations...

Etymologically rooted in the Greek concept of sumpatheia, "to feel with," or "having a fellow feeling," sympathy will always be haunted by the call to suffer for or with another. But a proleptic principle is also part of its impulse: When we sympathize with another's suffering, we anticipate that we may suffer similarly in the future. For instance, in the Rhetoric, Aritotle defined pity as that "feeling of pain caused by the sight of some evil, destructive or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves or some friend of ours, and moreover to befall us soon... And... we feel pity whenever we are in the condition of remembering that similar misfortunes have happened to us or ours, or expecting them to happen in the future...

By feeling sympathetically, that is by "reciprocating" all the "sensibilities" of an order, by embodying the emotions of that other, by answering the call of the suffering other, a man or woman at once moves toward moral perfection (hence toward the divine), toward an aesthetic sensibility (hence toward the Beautiful), toward domestic order (hence toward civilization), and civic integration (hence toward communal, national, or even racial accord). Sympathetic identification, as pedagogical "mold," ties together the aesthetic and the political, the domestic and the national, the public and the private, the divine (soul) and the merely human (body), and of course the self and other: an "involvement so elemental between self and the Other so as not merely to bring about emotional identification with an understanding of the Other, but to move and transform the sympathizing self incalculably, if temporarily ... some sort of 'dissolution of boundaries,' a blurring of self and the Other, is necessary in order not simply to achieve knowledge and understanding of another, but actually, somehow, to experience the Other." The process of sympathy, further, involves both the intellect and the emotions; properly performed it should be legible on the very body of the sympathetic subject: one should be able to read immediately the tracks of another's tears or the beams of joy from laughing eyes, the discomfiting of the body, the sighing, the belabored breathing - all as the sympathetic quivering of the divine soul. In this way, the sensual body became a key instrument linking the humanized mind to a benevolent deity. Following an argument recently made by Talal Asad, I would suggest that, as an "embodied practice," sympathy forms the "precondition for varieties of religious experiences"; in evangelical reformist spirituality, the sympathetic relation, as a bodily practice, became an essential discipline that enabled one to commune with god. Moreover, by filiating sympathy to concerns around the body, eighteenth-century thinkers articulated a crucial discursive overlap: the emergence of aesthetic enquiry and new medical theories of sensation and sensibility... 

Through sympathy, subjects came to imagine themselves as embodying the emotions of a suffering other; doing so they partook of the natural, and so divine, impulse of humanity, and one that was pleasurable even if painful. Such was the fabrication of the new subject of sympathy, a thoroughly paradoxical one, we might add. If, on the other hand, sympathy draws a man and woman toward moral perfection, toward an aesthetic sensibility, toward domestic and civic integration, on the other, as a kind of bridge across social, civilizational, and gender differences (or inequalities), sympathy also could undermine the moral and aesthetic norms and social order of the status quo. Who is to say where one's sympathy should stop?

... Rule Of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race and Power, Amit Rai

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