The inspiration for this essay came after writing, on another occasion: “My suffering becomes unbearable if ever I have to suffer alone. Misery loves company. There is a selfish, plaintive plea in each complaint, as one begs the other to hurt as well—even as one hopes that this may be just commiseration, rather than wrathful retribution. My pain may become language, may be understood, only on the condition that you, too, hurt.” In particular, my use of the common truism “misery loves company,” coupled with the phrase “just commiseration, rather than wrathful retribution,” seemed to me to be extremely profound, to such a point that I have a hard time crediting myself for any insight, should any insight be found within the above line of thought. I have to ask myself whether the phrase “misery loves company” has held a profound meaning to others, whether I have only recently felt what has always been felt by others when they’ve heard and uttered the phrase—or whether those in my position have grown accustomed to it, and have never given the phrase the thought it deserves.

In my defense, it is possible that “misery loves company” referred only to the highly contagious nature of pain, whereas my line of thought postulates that my pain seeks a multiplication of bearers, as if a portion of my pain were invisibly and inexplicably transferred to others in the act of confession or retribution. This reading of suffering as a contagion conjures a heroic image, like that of Camus’s Dr. Rieux, someone who, with sealed lips, is able to prevent the plague of suffering from spreading. This Stoic hero, this rebel, is whoever can suffer in silence. As I write, I am haunted by this image of quiet rebellion, as well as by that of the innocent and simpleminded laborer, Ishiguro’s butler, who, when asked how he is faring, responds simply: ‘I can’t complain.’ This pacifist extreme appears as odious to me as its wrathful alternative, and yet I am uncertain as to where the division lies. It remains to be seen whether the diffusion of pain shrinks or expands suffering, and whether certain modes of diffusion differ in their results.

In speaking of the diffusion of pain in such abstract terms, I cannot help but feel that I am engaging in little more than unscientific raving and hand-waving, even as I am aware that revenge and retribution are quite materially evident phenomena. I wonder if others ever think of the strangeness of revenge, beyond its obvious appearance in playground squabbles. I don’t accept the common view that revenge is a simple phenomenon, one that can be explained as an evolutionary self-defense mechanism. I take revenge to be exemplary of a transcendental, humanist question, such as the question of how it may be possible for a single word to change one’s physiological composition, to cause strife, to make someone strike another. I make the following hypotheses regarding the subject.

1. Empathetic violence is near-infinitely recursive. I want others to empathize with my suffering, which necessitates, first, that I empathize with others, which in turn makes me aware of the fact that complaints often harm those they address—the possible hypocrisy of my complaint therefore looms large, preventing me from releasing my frustrations, such that I develop a melancholic or auto-aggressive disposition. Such circuits find their break in public self-effacement. Public self-destruction is violent against others, insofar as it forces them to feel the pain of empathy. Public self-destruction cannot bear to cause this harm against others, and most certainly cannot do so directly, with the result that one hurts oneself, punishes oneself for one’s violence, in the very moment that one enacts violence. ‘Taking the high road’ is a euphemism whose behavioral correlative is public self-destruction, the allowance of another to cause harm (or harming oneself before the other), in order that the other will suffer guilt.

2. As a result of empathetic violence, retribution is an unseemly concept. Revenge is associated with childishness, an inept or self-destructive incontinence, such that—at least in contemporary discourse—to call an act retributive is to decry its unjust nature. It is unclear whether the aversion to revenge is a result of Christian ethics, a “turn-the-other-cheek” attitude which favors martyrdom, or whether this aversion precedes Christianity and may instead have a universally human—or universally sentient—origin.

2.1 The common response in contemporary discourse is to consider that wrath is a specifically Christian vice. After Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals gained prominence, one cannot think of the need to avoid retribution without thinking of ressentiment and slave morality. However, it is equally common for one to find the virtues of non-retribution in Greek thought as in Christian ethics, g. Socrates’s declaration that it is better to suffer injustice than cause it, his willingness to die at the hands of the polis, and Aeschylus’s Orestia as an allegory for the peaceable conclusion to otherwise cyclical violence.

2.2: The aversion to revenge is a universally human one; however, contextual and contingent factors play a role in determining an action’s status as retributive. All cultures despise wrath, but not all cultures agree on what constitutes wrath. Therefore, the appeal to non-violence—to one’s having claim to the non-violent course of action—is an appeal to universal justice.

2.2.I: Non-violence is unattainable. When one states that an act is non-violent, one means really that it is non-wrathful.

2.2.II: I take Derrida’s argument in “Violence and Metaphysics” to be as follows: violence is nothing more than change, which, because of the nature of an agent’s attachments, necessitates harm; such violence is caused, constantly, by the condition of temporality, because to be in time is to be torn by a ravenous dispersal; to the extent that an agent is able to act into the world, an agent should attempt to lessen this harm, but this agency is limited by the fact that harm is never fully avoidable. The appeal to ethics is therefore an appeal to the act which is least destructive, not most constructive.

2.2.III: One has time to kill, not time to murder.

3: Ressentiment has not typically been understood, perhaps not even by Nietzsche. Ressentiment is the inauthentic “I can’t,” which succeeds neither in achieving pride by acting as one wishes, nor in accepting the pleasures of powerlessness, of fully acceding one’s responsibility. Ressentiment is unethical because one falsely ascribes impossibility to the good or the beautiful act, and Nietzsche’s hypothesis, which seems correct, is that such self-imposed barriers are caused by cowardice. Ressentiment exists not when the victims claim that the oppressors are unjust, but when the strong internalize this narrative as a means of legitimating their fear of exerting their strength, thereby accepting a timidity which fails to allow proper defense or expression.

3.1: Nietzsche’s overtly anti-Christian deployment of ressentiment, as well as its association with slave morality, has much to do with Nietzsche’s embarrassment over his father’s seeming feebleness, with the result that Nietzsche’s diatribe against Christianity as a world-historical force is exaggerated. Ressentiment is not the property of a specifically early- or pre-modern Catholic, pastoral power.

3.2: Ressentiment is similarly at play in the inauthentic ‘I can,’ when one ascribes as possible a level of responsibility that is untenable, such that one develops self-loathing. Conservatives who cite Nietzsche (e.g. Harold Bloom) argue that progressives are plagued by such ressentiment, insofar as progressives attempt to eradicate injustices and inequalities that cannot be eliminated. The condition of such irrevocable inequality par excellence is Rawls’s famous scenario, wherein the distribution is chosen by—benefits—those who are worst off.

3.2.I: The inauthentic ‘I can’ presents a problem which is at play, also, in that strange relation between pride and self-pity. While that which I pity in myself is immediately a detriment to my condition, the act of pitying is an act of pride, insofar as it allows me to defer and thereby maintain my agency: I can excuse my failures by stating that they were exogenous; similarly, I can ignore my limitations by qualifying them as my environment’s limitations, not as me. I am that which handles limitations, not that which is limited.

3.2.I.a: The common use of the possessive when describing one’s body belies a common spiritualism, which professes that one is an eternal, non-corporeal entity. Yet, the fact that one owns one’s body is determined by the inseparability of person from body. Indeed, every theory of property relies on this possession of one’s body: I own my body, therefore I own what my body produces. Therefore, property is a relationship among bodies that is affected by bodies, not an ownership over bodies, i.e. successful or just ownership is a resonant stasis in inter-bodily affects.

3.2.I.b: Scenario #1: My colleagues are too stupid to understand my genius. Scenario #2: I have failed to communicate effectively. In both cases, the agent retains the possession of truth, but what is at play is the relation between the agent and the agent’s environment.

3.2.II: Take the example where an agent’s leg is dysfunctional, so as to render that agent unable to walk, and apply Klein’s logic of partial objects to it. The agent separates its being: I am that which chooses to walk, my leg is that which inhibits my choice. I say to myself that I am not my leg; but, for all outward appearances, any passerby would say that this broken leg is a part of me.

3.2.III: There seems to be a temporal aspect at play: an internal locus of control is maintained when the factors which contributed to failure were temporary; an external locus of control is maintained when the factors which contributed to failure are continuous and ineradicable.

3.2.IV: Partitions are sensible when they involve temporary objects; insensible when they involve permanent relations. I am that which will be irremovable from my experience, even if such aspects are not localized immediately in my body. I am not that which is removable from my experience, even if such aspects are localized in my body. An agent’s disability is constitutive for that agent; a broken leg, if it may heal, is not.

3.2.V: These partitions are at play in an agent’s resistance to medication. I partition myself into an authentic non-medicated self and an inauthentic medicated self on the presumption that my body is that which is eternal, the drug that which is temporary. This is a naïve view, which may be corrected once one realizes that one may choose to be the medicated self, may choose to have that medication be part of one’s continuous existence. Additionally, at play is the resistance to a cure as a form of abjection, see next essay, on Symmetry.

3.3: Ressentiment demonstrates that the boundary between the possible and the impossible is a highly political one. Conservative arguments tend to emphasize the potentialities of human agents as they supersede social constraints, e.g. entrepreneurs are much more successful motors for improvement than are welfare programs. Progressive arguments tend to emphasize the potentialities of technology, e.g. medicine heals much better than a ‘can do’ attitude, particularly in the domain of mental health. These boundaries ultimately pre-determine answers to the questions of who has suffered, to what extent, and why—which in turn structure our capacities to empathize with, and take responsibility for, others’ suffering.

3.4: The most prominent political question of today—often commonly denoted, derogatorily, as ‘identity politics’—is whether we are overly foreclosed to the possibility of harm, whether we are putting a greater onus on ourselves in this widespread culture of guilt, or whether we are justly accepting of our and others’ limitations. My hypothesis is that all three are at play in varying modalities according to social contexts, and that solutions can be found only once one takes very seriously the violence of empathy, and how this violence can and should be enforced.

3.5: What is at play is far more than the calculation of debts, though the logic of debts is often evoked in contemporary discussions of justice and privilege—for this logic assumes that there is some neutral time of accounting and discussion, when such neutrality is impossible. Indeed, the enactments of violence, counter-violence and empathy are at play in the very discussion of debts itself, such that the discursive act, the confession of pain, is a violent act with ethical implications, which has often been feared precisely for this violence, and which has yet to be thoroughly thought.

4: Suppose it were to be true, as is often implied in one’s disgust towards whining invertebrates, that a complaint worsens suffering. In other words, there is something to be said for the mentality whereby one might maintain a stiff upper lip or whistle while one works, such that one may actually eliminate suffering by attempting to ignore it, by handling—as all adults do—the daily chores of life. My intention is not to remain with this narrative; rather, I want to invert its axiology, while accepting its core logic: let us consider whether the one who complains is a martyr, insofar as the complainant must bear the full weight of one’s suffering without foreclosure. 

4.1: The rhetoric of ignoring, disregarding or tolerating one’s pain suggests that one never knows the extent to which one is suffering. One may therefore deny, as indeed many people do, that one suffers. Is this ignorance bliss, or is it a clinical, addictive failure? Is there not, indeed, something to be said for the willingness to acknowledge one’s own pain? That one does not know the extent of one’s suffering (especially not its relation to others’, nor to that level which is permissible in its inevitability) is the central problematic for the violence of empathy.

4.2: Let us attempt to model the vehicle of tolerance as follows: Pain exists as some variable x, while tolerance exists as some variable y, such that actually perceived suffering is x subtracted by y. Let us assume either that y is a cumulative variable in need of constant refreshment, or that it is limited by a certain threshold at any moment. The first case would be like that of a horse drawing a carriage, which can only travel for so far and so long before requiring a break. The second case is like that of a wall in a windstorm, which may support only a certain level of resistance before collapsing. It is possible that both describe the mechanisms of an agent’s tolerance, and that these mechanisms have a complex dependency (g. the rate of active tolerance affects longevity of tolerance, in much the same way that acceleration may increase friction). In any case, there is assumed both a synchronous and an a-synchronous aspect of tolerance.

4.3: Maturity is the measurement of one’s efficient usage of such capacity for tolerance. However, the most common rhetoric of maturity, deriving from Stoic norms, encourages one to expand one’s capacities for tolerance, while it remains to be seen whether this is within an agent’s capacities. The mature agent is therefore so attuned to one’s bodily dispersions and environmental stimuli as to know one’s limits and respond effectively to them. A weak ankle, when overworked, may quickly become a broken one. The body must learn to communicate its needs to itself effectively.

4.4: A just society mirrors a mature, healthy body. Take the limits of this inter-bodily communication and apply them on a social level: assume by extension that each agent plays its role in a rhizomatic social body, a system bound by the same scarcity of nutrients, which needs to allocate those nutrients effectively.

4.5: To put it bluntly, the conformist, the ‘good worker,’ is a bad root precisely for its inability to dissent, to acknowledge its own suffering.

4.6: Position 4.5 strikes me, and indeed it likely strikes many others, as being particularly odious. Firstly, because the majority of circumstances are such that people fail to empathize, and not that people fail to seek out empathy. However, it remains true that people do fail to seek out empathy, to decry the injustices they have suffered. But, even using the term ‘failure’ seems too strong in this context, as it seems to place an unbearable burden on the part of those who are suffering. And yet, in a vacuum, if one were told only that an agent were faced with an action x such that its long-term social benefits outweighed its immediate personal costs, then the support for this action would be unanimous. In practice, one is much less likely to consider unethical the one who fails to complete such an action x, if they are starting from a position of suffering.

4.7: The explanation for this divergence between theory and practice could be further explained with the logic that those who are suffering are incapacitated by that suffering. While this logic does much to bolster one’s responsibilities, to encourage one to empathize with others, I still resist it to the extent that it makes paternalistic judgments about another’s autonomy and capacities for self-advocacy. This paternalism can function either to silence others’ self-testimony, to ‘coddle’ where suffering does not actually exist, or to accept a level of responsibility for deciphering others’ silence which is untenable.

4.8: Another route to explaining this divergence could be to question the growing marginal resistances to suffering, which would have to be evident as a result of the mechanism of tolerance, and which would indicate that those who are suffering are thereby rendered—to an extent—incapable of undergoing the additional work of identifying and articulating that suffering.

4.8.I: The mere statement that I am suffering or have suffered (as well as that others are suffering or have suffered), enacts suffering, and it requires a certain level of composure and tolerance to testify to this suffering.

4.8.II: Such insight gets at the core of what precisely the work of counseling is, how it is, in fact, work—based in the communal nature of being a transient, grieving agent. Such insight gets precisely at the core of what it means to feel lonely, to share one’s suffering, to empathize.

4.8.III: Such insight opens up a more sinister reading of “I can’t complain,” as something other than the testament to insufficient cause for complaint. Instead, one suffers in an overwhelming sea of static; the one who cannot complain is rather pleading with the addressee, demanding help: “Please, I cannot escape the noise of my suffering, cannot find a quiet place from which to articulate my suffering; please, just help me find the words—please, I wish to speak.”

4.8.IV: Such insight does not excuse carte blanche counseling and “empathy” as always being the correct course of action; a good question to keep in mind: “when does the analyst begin to encourage the patient’s neurosis?”

4.9: On the one hand, the complainant is ignored on the assumption that the complaint has unnecessarily created suffering, has failed to accept that suffering which is necessary; on the other, the complainant is coddled from ever having to say a thing, has wrongly deemed impossible what would have otherwise been possible, what indeed proves necessary for longevity. In any case, ressentiment is liable to occur as a festering wound, a biding heat, a simmer, an accumulating boil. If the complainant enacts suffering now, it is always in the name of eradicating future disease. The limb must be severed; the idols may be shattered in one’s haste, as one must pack before the floodgates open.

5. The violence of empathy is further complicated by the fact that one may enjoy another’s suffering.

5.1: Immediately, this statement is likely to evoke an image of an envious miser or a power-hungry fiend: someone who enjoys taking what others have, having so that others may not; or someone who gains a sense of security through one’s capacity to render others insecure. Such figures are obviously distasteful, as they should be. But far less frequently is one willing to address the joy that the priest gains in pitying the pauper, just as a mother may gain a great sense of pride and love in absolving her child’s tears.

5.2: The joy of others’ suffering is far more pervasive than mere envy or sadistic schadenfreude. Such joy is necessary for the genres of tragedy and horror: it is the aesthetic effect that takes over when one reads The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, when one packs into the theater to watch a tragic play or a horror film.

5.2.I: The image of another’s suffering may be a token of joy precisely to the extent that it reminds one what is being enjoyed. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a potent example. The suffering of this double is not uncanny, it is desired.

5.3: This joy is at its most apparently evil when it motivates one to harm others. However, such joy becomes effective to the extent that it is able to motivate action; gratitude—which comprises schadenfreude, pity and pride in their highest forms—is the reward of those who aid the less fortunate. However, this joy becomes inefficacious to the extent that it engenders complacency (one helps, but only just enough, and in just such a way, that one will continue to be needed.)

The Violence of Empathy series continues with Empathy as an Act of Reading, which can be found here.