Empathy/Sympathy
Abstract
The goal of this project is to put our intuitions of love and understanding—and more generally, our practice of relationality—on trial, intuitions that have been shaped through a resonant colonial and patriarchal history. The main object of critique in this theoretical and autoethnographic analysis is empathy: empathy as tragic play, providing catharsis in its distant indulgence; it is, at every moment, a step away disguised as a step towards. The way out proposed in this project is a with-feeling¸ a sympathetic resonance, an autoerotic encompassment. This means that to touch is not to feel yourself through others, but to feel others through yourself. This essay is also an attempt to embody the methodology it proposes, weaving between theory and testimony to bring out a power of critique and association through the body.