What follows is the third part of the Violence of Empathy series, which begins here. It is the sequel to Empathy as an Act of Reading, which can be accessed here.

1: Resonance is the antithesis of loneliness, which may be summarized with the common phrase “the feeling of being understood,” “of being seen.” Counseling is one vehicle by which suffering diminishes in its diffusion, resonance is the other.

1.1: Resonance is a symmetry, a sympathy of symptoms.

1.2: Symmetry: Those who suffer often feel that they suffer alone. Resonance occurs when a description matches or reflects my experience; this resonance may feel clarifying, which is to say that it removes suffering of mind. This resonance is augmented when I have no reason to expect you to understand (“How did you know?”).

1.2.I: In addition to providing hope and means for a cure, the diagnosis is therapeutic to the extent that it removes isolation.

1.2.II: Resonance is the vehicle by which collective grief (e.g. support groups) function.

1.2.II.a: Seeing another suffer as a result of my suffering—they frown, say “I’m sorry,” (One should pay attention to the Romance languages’ translation of ‘I’m sorry’ as Lo siento [I feel it] or Mi dispiace [it pains me]) “oh, how terrible”—lessens my suffering of mind by eliminating the questioning-of-suffering. The same is true when I encounter others who testify to having similar experiences, and verify that we have suffered.

1.3: Qualitative researchers mark the accuracy of their work based on its capacity to “resonate” with clients; this capacity to “resonate” is matched when therapists mark a treatment as efficacious insofar as it grants a patient “insight.” The matter of insight and resonance is as follows: “To the extent that I feel a document or discursive agent has accurately recounted my past, I trust that document or agent to predict my future.” 

1.3.I: Resonance and insight are most effective when treating anxiety, the fear of what is unpredicted.

1.3.II: The capacity to treat anxiety through resonance and insight is limited insofar as the very phenomenon—a concoction of skepticism and pessimism—which renders the future nebulous makes an agent uncertain also of one’s past.

1.4: Symmetry of symptoms is resisted as well as desired: it is possible for “how did you know?” to become “how could you know, how could you ever understand?”

1.4.I: Symmetry of symptoms may induce abjection; this symmetry is uncanny to the extent that seeing oneself in another forces one to see oneself as an object.

1.4.II: Symmetry of symptoms induces hope to the extent that an agent realizes that others have suffered and have survived or ameliorated that suffering, induces hopelessness to the extent that an agent imagines being a part of an infinite and unbreakable chain of suffering.

1.4.III: In addition to the desire to be understood, there is a desire not to be understood. In order to be an agent, I must be unique; in order to be unique, I must be unpredictable, cannot be completely understood.

1.4.IV: Symmetry may also be resisted in much the same way that a patient resists a cure; one does not wish to believe that one’s disease was curable.

1.4.IV.a: Cures simultaneously affirm and refute my agency. A cure may furnish the means by which I have control over my condition in the future. At the same time, a cure makes me realize the physicality of my existence, as well as my own idiocy as a consequence of that physicality. The assurance of my proper condition is more a matter of routine than ritual, but still one prefers the pageantry.

1.4.IV.b: One is more resistant to simple cures than to seemingly complicated ones.

1.4.IV.c: One is more resistant to a cure that is prescribed, rather than that which one discovers for oneself. Good advice often appears as banal platitudes. This is particularly true when the prescriber appears dumb or odious.

1.5: Sympathy: Those who witness others’ suffering wish to understand that suffering, and accomplish this understanding by performing that suffering on themselves. Example: I may not understand what it is to be struck through the stomach, but I may clench my gut as you recount how you were wounded.

1.5.I: Sympathy may be a result of social allocation of toleration.

1.5.I.a: When I see that another suffers, I realize that their capacity for tolerance is lessened; they are unable to enact suffering.

1.5.I.b: I enact greater suffering upon myself, take up others’ chores and responsibilities when they are suffering, because I realize that they will fail if left alone, and that their failures will cost me; sympathy is a undertaken to ensure the longevity of the social body.

1.5.II: The incomprehensibility of another’s suffering is a question upon my agency. The motivation for sympathy may be the monkey-see-monkey-do attitude of “I could do that.” Another’s suffering induces suffering of mind—“how is this possible”—and that suffering of mind ceases when I am able to undergo the same suffering.

1.5.II.a: Survivor’s guilt is often expressed in humanistic terms, as the need to mourn. The more blunt form of survivor’s guilt is that the loss of the other puts one’s autonomy into question; one’s proximity to death renders more evident one’s own mortality. That which killed the other may also kill me; my fear of the future becomes heightened.

1.5.II.b: If I am able to avoid the cause of the other’s suffering, or if I am able to imagine that the other could have avoided the cause of their suffering, then suffering of mind is lessened, and sympathy, or the violence of empathy, is not enacted.

1.5.II.c: The sublimity of another’s suffering occurs when it makes me grateful for what I have, thankful toward the other for suffering on my behalf—gratitude is, again, a composite of pride, pity and schadenfreude.

1.5.II.d: This ambivalence towards the other’s suffering—which may manifest itself as either gratitude or a challenge to one’s agency—is seen quite evidently in one’s attitude towards one’s forebears. One is grateful to one’s forbears to the extent that their suffering has forever expiated the possibility of failure. One is skeptical of the suffering of one’s forbears to the extent that one may have to repeat that suffering.

1.5.II.d1: The younger generations are always skeptical that the elders indeed suffered. The elders are always skeptical that those who have followed them may truthfully be cured, may truthfully be spared of what they have suffered.

1.5.II.d2: The above relation has drastic consequences for the development of medications. The conflation of drugs and medications is as follows: drugs are a cheat, a charlatan’s way to happiness; drug-users are short-sighted and do not properly accept their limitations, are unwilling to accept the world on its terms, and are in that respect acting by cowardly ressentiment. Medications are an effective way of treating that which is ; as all require food to live.

1.5.III: If medications are effective, then this leads one to believe that many predecessors suffered from the same or similar illness. In the case of mental illnesses, one would rather believe that one is suffering simply from poor choices than mechanical impossibilities, in order to believe that others have not suffered.

1.5.IV: One fears the cheat, the shortcut, because it cheapens what it is to be happy, makes one feel that one is living an unfair game, limits one’s expectations for future happiness. If the game is fair, then I may yet win it.

1.6: The arguments above explain sympathy and symmetry by means of why an agent would choose them; but, it remains possible that they are simple and inevitable phenomena, comparable in that respect to the gravity between bodies.

2. If it is not purely mechanical, then resonance, like the violence of empathy, occurs by an act of reading, and may therefore be misread.

2.1: Resonance is affectively different when it is read synchronously and a-synchronously.

2.2: There are certain modalities of reading suffering that generate resonance more easily than others. There are certain agents whose suffering is more likely to generate resonance, i.e. those with whom I am familiar, and those whom I assume to be familiar with me.

2.3: Resonance is lost through mediation.

2.3.I: A human body that responds and reacts to my story as I tell it, particularly one to which I have a long history attached, is the greatest vehicle for generating resonance.

2.3.II: Past suffering is more uncertain than present suffering. Simultaneously, this forgetfulness disallows one to feel the presence of one’s predecessors, to learn from the past, while also allowing time to pardon, for grief to cease in time.

2.3.III: Suffering that an agent reads as being inflicted by that agent is more likely to generate resonance.

2.3.III.a: Positive: I feel some anger at those who are happy in my time of suffering, but am able to separate their happiness from my grief, to the extent that I realize that I am not responsible for their affect. Similarly, when others are sad as I am telling them my life story, this reads much differently than when I see others who are sad at the same time that I am grieving.

2.3.III.b: Negative: Agents therefore have a predilection towards controlling others’ affects. This is the vehicle for revenge.

3: There are currents which surround agential bodies, and which determine the possibilities of reading suffering and resonance, and which determine the affect that such reading will have. An agent’s affection towards another is the intensification of resonance and reading of that agent’s condition. This intensification may be positively or inversely correlated (e.g. love or hatred.)

3.1: It is possible that my reading of another’s condition has a greater affect than my reading of my own condition.

3.1.I: Positive example: Parents often seem more invested in their child’s well-being than their own. More specifically, I may be more proud when my child learns the culturally appropriate forms of defecation than when I have published my work, though one could argue that many more human beings have learned how to defecate properly than have published work. am more invested There are those whose presence one desires.

3.1.II: Negative Example: Revenge may induce monomania. Ahab suffers far more than Moby Dick does, but still this suffering seems worthwhile to him.

3.2: It is often and wrongly assumed that love and hate are antithetical. Many thinkers, such as Klein and Levinas, have demonstrated the ambivalence of affection.

3.2.I: Affection describes a desire to have another in one’s presence; both love and hate display affection towards their objects.

3.2.I.a: When I hate an agent, I desire their presence for the sake of harming them.

3.2.I.b: When I love an agent, I desire their presence for the sake of helping them.

3.2.I.c: Hate is often love corrupted.

3.2.II: Affection describes the effect of the presence of the attached object, it does not describe one’s expectations from the attached object.

3.2.III: The opposite of affection is fear or disgust.

3.2.III.a: Fear and disgust do not describe my expectations from the object; though my expectations may induce fear or disgust. Note: I may still loathe that which attempts to help me, and I may still be attracted towards that which harms me.

3.2.IV: Fear is less affectively pervasive than affection. Whether the objects of my affection are present or absent, they exert a pressure on me (I miss them in their absence, am grateful in their presence). The objects of my fear exert pressure only when they are present. I do not get a sense of pride from the absence of my feared object, though I often enjoy the presence of those towards whom I hold affection.

3.3: Many toxic relationships or addictive environments are the result of hate failing to turn to fear and disgust. Once I acknowledge that the other is no longer helping, but is rather harming me, I change my relation to it, but my attachment remains. I now manifest my attachment through the desire to play a game of mutual harm, rather than eradicate my attachment, and avoid the object altogether.

3.4: Affection is the result of history. All agents display habits or addictions, which is to say that agential beings are attached to continuity; my being in the presence of an object induces an attachment to that object.

3.5: Affection is defined partly by familiarity; I am more attached to objects with which I am familiar.

3.5.I: When I name that object, I declare to some extent that it becomes my [name]. Familiarity is the result of active awareness of an object’s presence in my environment. This is the street where I live; this is my street. Ownership always is a declaration of familiarity and attachment, which amounts to saying that conscious presences create habits to a greater extent than unconscious ones.

3.5.II: One does not fear the unknown. Indeed, to fear an object is to have already named it, and to have familiarized oneself with its negative effects. The unknown describes only a state of not being attached; fear is a negative attachment.

3.5.II.a: When one says that one fears the unknown, one means rather to say that one fears impossibility, the limitation of one’s agency, the idiocy of being a physical being. Children are afraid of the darkness because they have a familiarity with it; they can name the shadows that haunt them. They have a fear of the state of being blind; blind children are not afraid of the dark.

3.6: There is a desire for a multiplicity of attachments, affections compete and are competitive, insofar as there is a drive for new affections.

3.6.I: The addictive impulse is met with a double-bind; there is also an impulse to change. This double-bind is non-paradoxical insofar as there is a difference between security and ossification.

3.6.I.a: Insecure attachments heighten desire for diversity; secure attachments lessen the desire for diversity. Diversity overreaches when attachments are insecure; security overreaches when attachments are addictive.

3.6.I.b: The desire for diversity is not only a factor of meeting certain modalities of desire, the desire for diversity persists within a specific modality. Example: an agent’s desire for musicality cannot be expressed merely as the desire for sound, but as the desire for variation in sounds.

3.6.I.c: The desire for diversity is a factor of the modality of desire at play. Example: Diversity in romantic attachments may differ from diversity in other attachments.

 3.6.II: There may be a sufficient level of diversity that obviates the impulse to adventure.

3.6.II.a: The bounding principle of diversity is forgetfulness.

3.6.II.b: To satisfy the diversity requirements of an agent with forgetfulness n, a series of size no greater than n is needed.

3.6.II.c: When an object begins to feel new is ultimately dependent on an agent’s capacity to forget.