Daniel O'Gorman
In his book, Empathy and Moral Development, the psychologist Martin Hoffman defines empathic response as ‘the involvement of psychological processes that make a person have feelings that are more congruent with another’s situation than with his own situation’ (Hoffman 30). An emphasis on such empathic connections has been prominent in the field of trauma studies since the 1990s, and particularly in the work of Cathy Caruth, who suggests in Unclaimed Experience that ‘History, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas’ (Caruth 24).
In recent years, a rhetoric not dissimilar to this has been gaining ascendency well beyond the academic sphere: on his campaign trail in 2007, for instance, Barack Obama famously stated that what the US Supreme Court lacked under the Bush administration was ‘the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young, teenaged mom; the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges’ [1].
The events of September 11 2001 and its long-tem aftermath have, more than any other contemporary political issue, prompted critical theorists to adopt a comparably empathic line by calling for a political response founded in the experience of post-9/11 trauma and mourning for the dead. The thinker who has taken up this position most prominently is Judith Butler, who argues in Precarious Life that ‘Such mourning might (or could) effect a transformation in our sense of international ties that would crucially rearticulate the possibility of democratic political culture here and elsewhere’ (Butler 40). Her 2011 lecture on the subject, delivered at the Nobel Museum, Oslo, is available to watch here.
A comparable position can be identified in a number of the essays in Judith Greenberg’s edited collection, Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Marianne Hirsch, for instance, invokes Walter Benjamin in a discussion of photographs that she took on and after September 11, suggesting that the images are ‘composed of layers of interconnected moments’ (Hirsch 73). The topic is engaged with most fully, however, in Jill Bennett’s contribution to the collection, ‘The Limits of Empathy and the Global Politics of Belonging’. Bennett draws on the distinction that Kaja Silverman – herself borrowing from Max Scheler – elsewhere makes between ‘heteropathic’ and ‘ideopathic’ modes of empathic identification (the former implying ‘an identification with an alien body or experience’, the latter being ‘essentially self-referential, grounded on shared reality’), suggesting that ‘[i]deopathic identification with the victims of the World Trade Center attacks is … dependent on maintaining a sense of the victims as sufficiently “like us” to enable us to imagine ourselves in their place’ (Bennett 134). This, in turn, leads her to ask ‘on what basis, then, were “alien” identifications repudiated and cultural affinities reinscribed? And why did the suffering of one particular group engender empathy at the cost of another?’ (Bennett 134).
Firemen's boots at the 9/11 memorial in Battery Park [Image by Ulterior Epicure under a CC-BY-NC-ND license]
This kind of questioning is also evident in Michael Rothberg’s contribution to the volume, in which he explores the ‘volatile dynamics of intersecting experiences of suffering’ (Rothberg 148). He expands upon it in his chapter, ‘Seeing Terror, Feeling Art’, in Literature After 9/11, edited by Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. Arguing that ‘terrorism doesn’t so much eliminate as readjust affect’, he identifies the writing of Don DeLillo as being particularly able to ‘help us to reimagine the possibility of seeing and feeling at the same time in order to foster an embodied form of understanding’ (Rothberg 2008: 139, 131). The literary critic, Richard Gray, takes a similar line. Although more critical of DeLillo (as well as of similarly prominent authors of 9/11 fiction, such as John Updike and Jay McInerney), he argues that certain other novelists have shown a tendency to ‘respond to the bigger picture’ (Gray 134). These include Russell Banks, Jennifer Egan, Deborah Eisenberg, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Cormac McCarthy and Mohsin Hamid, writers who, he posits, at least to some degree participate in an ‘enactment of difference’ (Gray 134).
The contribution that these theorists have made towards a reformulation of the mechanics of empathic identification after 9/11 has been valuable in numerous ways, not least in countering the arguable deficit of empathy in the Western public sphere for those suffering the effects of unfettered neoliberal expansion during the years leading up to the attacks. However, I would like to offer something of a constructive critique. While I do not want to undermine the importance of empathic affect in the post-9/11 geopolitical context, in my view the arguments put forward by these thinkers might benefit from a more extensive thinking-through of the concept’s potential shortfalls. As Hoffman makes clear in his study, empathic response – while crucial to the project of ‘demand[ing] basic human rights everywhere’ – can in some situations actually be counter-productive in the progression towards this ethical goal (Hoffman 298). He describes a number of ‘self-destructive mechanisms’ by which empathy can effectively undercut itself, which he collects under the umbrella term ‘empathic over-arousal’: that is, ‘an involuntary process that occurs when an observer’s empathic distress becomes so painful and intolerable that it is transformed into an intense feeling of personal distress, which may move the person out of the empathic mode entirely’ (Hoffman 198). He argues that ‘the culmination effect may be that the observer’s empathic distress diminishes to the point of the person becoming indifferent to the victim’s suffering’ (Hoffman 205-6).
Empathy: responding to the bigger picture [Image by Elisa Dudnikova under a CC-BY-NC-ND license]
With this in mind, I would tentatively suggest that a new post-9/11 ethics drawn from trauma-induced empathy might not in itself be sufficient for a serious rethinking of the contemporary politics of identity and difference. I would posit, rather, that in order for empathy to have significant practical effect beyond the academic sphere, it needs to be compounded with thinking itself, in the sense in which Hannah Arendt defines the term: namely, as a ‘two-in-one’, or ‘the specifically human actualization of consciousness in the thinking dialogue between me and myself [which] suggests that difference and otherness … are the very conditions for the existence of man’s mental ego’ (Arendt 187). Empathy without thought – that is, without an acknowledgement of the ‘dialogue’ between the self and its internal other, or the ‘duality of myself with myself’ – can easily become not only a self-defeating mechanism, but also, more damagingly, a narcissistic and inadvertently imperialistic one, in which the empathic act takes precedence over the political action that it can hypothetically initiate (Arendt 187). By compounding empathy with ‘thought’, it may actually be possible to reinforce what Dominick LaCapra calls ‘empathic unsettlement’, or the ‘desirable affective dimension of inquiry which complements and supplements empirical research and analysis’ (LaCapra 78). In other words, in order for theorists of post-9/11 trauma to resist falling prey to ‘empathic over-arousal’, it might be necessary for them to acknowledge a need for empathy itself to be ‘unsettled’ and critically interrogated.
How can we teach "empathic unsettlement"? [Image by sigckgc under a CC-BY license]
My point is not so much that empathy needs to be toned down or reduced, but rather that the recent drive in theory towards a more indiscriminate empathic response to global violence since 9/11 is to some degree wrongly framed: specifically, I would suggest there has been a tendency to equate a lessening of empathic discrimination too easily with an increase in empathy for those hitherto beyond its reach. In contrast to this, I am arguing in favour of more, not less, discrimination in post-9/11 empathic response. Diverging to some extent from Butler’s identification of the ‘precariousness’ of life (and, in turn, the equal horror of all violence regardless of its context) as a basis for broadening the scope of empathic global relations, I would suggest that it is precisely because of this equal precariousness of all life that a more thoughtful judgement needs to be made about what constitutes an unjustifiable act of violence. In order to empathise with a victim of violence, it is, as Butler rightly suggests, necessary to recognise his or her life as precarious, but I would add that it is also necessary to recognise that s/he is a victim, and as such a victim of something. While this ‘something’ might not be identifiable straight away, it can potentially set in motion a trail of thought that aims at coming to a judgement about the violence in question, as such causing an instinctive, indiscriminate empathy with the victim to evolve into a qualified, discriminating one, placing it in context and creating the circumstances necessary for an appropriate empathically-informed intellectual response to take place. It is precisely such a response that contemporary theory engaging with 9/11 and its aftermath has to some degree fallen short of either calling for or achieving.
CITATION: Daniel O'Gorman, "Empathy after 9/11," Alluvium, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2012): n. pag. Web. 1 June 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v1.1.05.
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’] http://www.alluvium-journal.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Daniel-OGorman-pic1.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Daniel O'Gorman is completing a PhD in post-9/11 fiction and critical theory in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London and is Associate Lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University. [/author_info] [/author]
Works Cited:
Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).
Bennett, Jill. ‘The Limits of Empathy and the Global Politics of Belonging’, in Judith Greenberg, (ed.), Trauma at Home: After 9/11, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2006).
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Gray, Richard. ‘Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis’, in American Literary History, 21, No. 1 (2009): 128-151, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajn061
Greenberg, Judith (ed.). Trauma at Home: After 9/11, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
Hirsch, Marianne. ‘I Took Pictures: September 2001 and Beyond’, in Trauma at Home: After 9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
Hoffman, Martin. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Keniston, Ann and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (eds). Literature After 9/11 (Oxford: Routledge, 2008).
LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
Livingstone, Abby and Mark Murray. ‘Context of Obama’s “empathy” remark’, MSNBC (http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2009/05/01/4430634-context-of-obamas-empathy-remark).
Rothberg, Michael. 2003. ‘“There is no poetry in this”: Writing, Trauma, and Home’, in Judith Greenberg, (ed.), Trauma at Home: After 9/11, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
Rothberg, Michael. 2008. ‘Seeing Terror, Feeling Art’, in Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (eds), Literature After 9/11 (Oxford: Routledge, 2008).
Notes:
[1] Barack Obama, speech to Planned Parenthood, 17 July 2007, qtd in Abby Livingstone and Mark Murray ‘Context of Obama’s “empathy” remark’, MSNBC (http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2009/05/01/4430634-context-of-obamas-empathy-remark).
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