I Suffer, Therefore I Am: Engaging with Empathy in Contemporary French Women's Writing by Kathryn Robson

Abstract

Reviewed by: I Suffer, Therefore I Am: Engaging with Empathy in Contemporary French Women's Writing by Kathryn Robson Dominique Carlini Versini Robson, Kathryn. I Suffer, Therefore I Am: Engaging with Empathy in Contemporary French Women's Writing. Legenda, 2019. ISBN 978-1-78188-675-5. Pp. ix + 140. As Robson observes, empathy is central in contemporary debates and particularly in liberal discourse (4), whether it is through regular calls for empathy in political leaders, or through emerging social movements demanding a more compassionate relationship to our planet and all its inhabitants. Robson investigates the concept in the work of contemporary French writers such as Marie Darrieussecq, Chloé Delaume, Camille Laurens, Véronique Olmi, and Delphine de Vigan. Reflecting on narratives of eating disorder, the loss of a child, the killing of one's child, and autofictional accounts of trauma, Robson asks: "[W]hat is at stake in reading narratives of other people's pain?" (1). Laurens's accusation of plagiarism against Darrieussecq provides the title of the book—through an allusion to Darrieussecq's certificat doloriste—as well as the basis for the interrogation of the ethical position of the reader engaging with these texts (1–4). Laurens's argument, according to which one cannot write about what one has not experienced, is extended here to the reader: How can we read suffering that is alien to us? How can we understand what makes us uncomfortable, and even distressed? To answer these questions, Robson reflects on the difference between empathy, compassion, and sympathy, drawing on a wide range of theories from Dominick LaCapra's "empathic unsettlement" (16) to Judith Butler's notion of framing. She reveals the limits of empathy, which might come at the risk of preventing a politicized response to or of consuming the narrative subject's suffering (13). The discussion on the unimaginable in the following chapters is particularly fascinating. [End Page 288] In the second chapter, which focuses on autobiographical accounts of the loss of a child by Laure Adler, Sophie Daull and Laurens, Robson shows that the reader's empathy is "rejected from the start" (49) by the writers-narrators, as the texts underline the impossibility for the reader to know what a bereaved mother experiences. At the other end, the third chapter reflects on maternal filicides, looking at real-life cases that have taken place in France in the last decades, and their exploration in the literary works of Sophie Marinopoulos, Mazarine Pingeot, Olmi, and Laurence Tardieu. Robson shows the problematization of empathy in such narratives, where readers' empathic response can work to reinforce "dominant cultural ideas of maternity" (87). Robson suggests to redefine empathy—not as a way to "stand into someone else's shoes," which implies a stable definition of the self and of the other—but to rethink it "in and through the impossibility of reconciliation between self and other" (123). In interrogating our response to challenging texts that take us out of our comfort zone, Robson invites us to reflect on our reading practice and engage in more ethical empathetic reading. This book is essential for readers interested in contemporary French fiction and specifically the work of women writers, trauma studies, and readers' response, but also for any reader who would like to reflect on more ethical reading practices. Dominique Carlini Versini Durham University (UK) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French