Abstract
The article proposes to rethink the idea of empathy in the context of the question on dynamics organising the realm of urban co-presence in the times of environmental crisis. I put forward the thesis that empathy is not solely a cognitive ability of subject but a material, relational and deterritorializing process operating with urban entanglements, being a the same moment oppositional to entropy. The arguments in favor of the proposed approach to empathy are based on the diffractive reading of Theodor Lipps’s projective theory of empathy, consisting in its interpretation through the lens of new materialistic approach. Referring new materialists’ thought to Lipps’s findings, I show that some threads of their thinking about ontology of diverse naturalcultural phenomena can be found in Lipps’s studies on empathy. I arrive with the conclusion that new materialistic translation of the notion of empathy which shows its inseparability of the notion of sympathy, makes it a useful conceptual tool for inventing new, more ethical modes of urban co-presence in the age of sixth extinction.
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