Empathic Unsettlement Research Articles

Scenography of the Unimaginable: Exploring Trauma of Others in 872 days. Voices of the besieged city

The article explores the scenographic rendering of trauma in the theatre performance 872 days. Voices of the besieged city staged by a small theatre, Subbota, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The performance delves into the complex issues of private narratives of traumatic experiences, which, for decades, were deemed unimportant and even disruptive within the context of victory and glory of The Great Patriotic War. The production is based on memoirs and diaries of witnesses of the Leningrad siege. This study explores the connection between the scenographic ecology and empathic unsettlement, which is understood as a tool of approaching trauma through the experience of the audience. The article analyses how the scenographic rendering of trauma allows for potential representation and understanding of traumatic experience. It further looks at a theatre space as a place for mourning and reflexivity that allows the possibility of working through past trauma to better understand the present.

The role of empathy in bridging Western and Indigenous knowledges: Dominick LaCapra and Ailton Krenak

ABSTRACT This article rethinks the problems of empathy in historical theory in the context of current discussions about environmental problems, relations between humans and nonhumans as well as Western and Indigenous knowledges. The category of ‘empathic unsettlement’, coined by the theorist of history Dominick LaCapra, is presented to address the role of empathy as a way to know, engage and narrate the experience of historical subjects in the past. In this article, I analyse and expand the understanding of empathy in dialogue with reflections by the Indigenous activist and intellectual, Ailton Krenak. The purpose of this article is not to review the literature on the topic of empathy or to bring comparative analyses from the reflections of LaCapra and Krenak. Rather, their works serve as a platform that creates space for discussing the notion of empathy as a bridging concept that helps to develop a complementary and collaborative approach between Western and Indigenous knowledges. I claim that the role of empathy is to recognize other ontologies, epistemologies, and cosmologies, and to ‘make time to tell new stories’ that would contribute to building sustainable knowledge.

The haze of the Shoah

AbstractWhen Holocaust survivor Anna Langfus (1920–1966) left Poland for France in 1946, she broke all ties with her home country. French became her language of choice for the three novels she published between 1960 and 1965, and she never used Polish at home nor taught it to her only daughter. Yet, in a contribution to a volume on Chopin published a few months before her death, she had the famous composer cry out: ‘I do not want to die in this country. […] No, not here. But at home, in my home, the only home I ever owned, my parents' home. A home I shall never see again; a country I have abandoned.’ Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva (abjection) and Dominick LaCapra (empathic unsettlement) I explore representations of exile in Langfus's fiction in three respects: the incommunicability of the Shoah and the ensuing exilic condition of the Holocaust survivor (exile from others); the fragmentation/dislocation of the narrator's body as expression of the survivor's existential anguish (exile from self); the fleeting solace offered by creative fiction and the connection established with readers (suspension of exile). Throughout this discussion, I will be guided by the motif of the fog, which features strongly in Langfus's Chopin text.

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

Robson, Kathryn. I Suffer, Therefore I Am: Engaging with Empathy in Contemporary French Women’s Writing. Cambridge: Legenda (Research Monographs in French Studies, 56), 2019. 140 pp. £75.00 / $99.00 / €85.00. ISBN 978–1–7818–8675–5. Kathryn Robson’s excellent I Suffer, Therefore I Am appears very timely in the light of ongoing debates surrounding representative and existential ‘authenticity’, and the degree to which those of us with no knowledge or experience of particular life events can profess to have any (empathic) understanding of them. This study examines the representation of suffering in a range of contemporary female-authored texts in French and how readerly empathic responses to it ‘are shaped by constraints around the ways in which suffering can be articulated and framed’ (p. 2). It discusses the ethics of portraying suffering through the slippery prestidigitatory self of autofiction and the degree of readerly resistance and identification possible when interpellated within such a ‘personal’ account of pain. Robson examines the different political readings of empathy: does it incorporate a prosocial impetus or, rather, a solipsistic smugness that ‘there but for the grace of God...’? The work has four chapters dealing with narratives of anorexia, accidental child deaths, maternal filicide and autofictional accounts that self-reflexively lay bare the textual intricacies of the writer/reader relationship. I Suffer, Therefore I Am is striking in its nuanced approach to the emotional and linguistic semantics of empathy, in its refusal to accept easy answers or interpretations, even if there is an occasional sense of an overly contestatory or qualified stance vis-à-vis existent exegeses. This approach can also be attributed to Robson’s interest in ‘empathic unsettlement’ (p. 15), a term she borrows from Dominick LaCapra, and in what renders the readerly experience of a narrativized suffering uncomfortable – including that of her own readers. This assured study convincingly concludes by emphasizing that textual empathy is perhaps less about acts of bridging between two discrete individuals, than about ‘the relation between self and other founded in mutual woundedness and dispossession’ (p. 119), a relationship characterized by an incomplete and vulnerable opening-up of oneself to the other in order that they too may inhabit that space with their own lives/stories. [https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqac014]

Growing Up with Ghosts: Dynamics of Rememory and Trauma in a Malaysian Filial Memoir

Communicating stories matter when writers highlight the dynamics of mining the most private experiences for material. Whether humiliating or painful, it is often in the hands of writers that stories are made profound, interesting and fascinating. Yet, to readers, vivid scenarios, specific identification, convincing characters and real-life snapshots, just to name a few, present insights into human condition. Malaysian writers who report such investigations describing more than just their own memories and histories include Bernice Chauly and her critically acclaimed memoir, “Growing Up with Ghosts”. “Growing Up with Ghosts” begins with a private memory of a four-year-old girl at the freak drowning of her father and gradually unfolds into a patrio/matriographic memoir that recounts the paternal and maternal history of her Chinese and Punjabi ancestries. Using key concepts of memory theory and trauma studies including rememory, postmemory and empathic unsettlement, this article primarily examines the collection of episodic and semantic memory presented in the memoir. The reflexive and often sporadic, chaotic recounts following the death of her father provides a vivid depiction of the experience of post-parental death. The findings reveal how the filial memoir implicates the reader through “empathic unsettlement” of the trauma suffered by the memoirist through acts of memory, rememory and postmemory. The reader also suffers the burden through postmemory in the act of reading the delayed, indirect and secondary memory of the memoirist. Reading a multigenre, multivocal narrative can capture the theme of loss and grief not merely as a form of selfpositioning, but more significantly, as a move towards creating an “identity forging discourse”.

The post-shoah fiction of Anna Langfus (1920–1966): reader’s positioning and empathic unsettlement

Urodzona w Polsce francuskojęzyczna pisarka żydowskiego pochodzenia — Anna Langfus (1920–1966) — jest autorką wielu tekstów o wysokiej wartości referencyjnej, literackiej, epistemologicznej i etycznej. Bohaterami jej trzech nowatorskich powieści, opartych na osobistym doświadczeniu utraty i wyobcowania, są osoby skrajnie wyalienowane. W utworach tych centralnym zagadnieniem jest tożsamość po Holokauście, a uwaga skupia się na wypowiedziach i doświadczeniach ocalałego. Jednocześnie stanowią one próbę nawiązania etycznego kontaktu z czytelnikiem, któremu, w odróżnieniu od bohaterów Langfus, obce są tego rodzaju traumatyczne przeżycia. Autor artykułu, korzystając z wprowadzonego przez Dominicka LaCaprę pojęcia „empatycznego niepokoju”, i przywołując opinie Langfus na temat literatury, omawia niektóre ze stosowanych przez nią chwytów narracyjnych (rezygnacja z patosu, luka, milczenie, elipsa), służących etycznemu apelowi do czytelnika.

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

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

A practical gaze at the Warsaw Ghetto: revealing excess & lack in A Film Unfinished

ABSTRACT Yael Hersonski’s Holocaust documentary A Film Unfinished has been read as an exercise in empathic unsettlement that destabilizes the propagandistic intentions of a Nazi gaze that produced footage of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, this paper argues that Hersonski also shows that a practical gaze that incorporates the gazes of those both inside and outside of the footage can more effectively reveal the contours of regime-made atrocity while humanizing victims of the Holocaust as agents involved in the construction of the footage’s meaning.

English Language Notes Edited Collection: “Trauma and Horror”

315 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE WORKS CITED Davis, Heather. “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures,” philoSOPHIA 5.2 (2015): 231-50. del Ray, Lester. “Helen O’Loy.” 1938. Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Vol. 1 (192964 ). Ed. Robert Silverberg. New York: Orb: 42-52. Padgett, Lewis. “The Proud Robot.” 1943. Robots Have No Tails. New York: Gnome, 1952. 7-52. English Language Notes Edited Collection: “Trauma and Horror.” Later nineteenth-century psychology appropriated the medical term trauma, used to denote a wound derived from the violent piercing of the skin, to describe a violent breaching of subjectivity. The event instantiating psychic trauma is so devastating that the ego’s defenses are broken down, and the subject is powerless to resist the overwhelming impressions that flood its barriers, or to manage the swell of affective distress that results. The abreaction (working-through) of trauma should be furthered by the most painstakingly accurate representation of its inception and effects. Yet contemporary trauma theorists have described the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of a “true” representation of traumatic events, given that the very experience of trauma involves the derangement or shattering of the subjective apparatus designed to process it. Traumatic events can only be understood belatedly and imperfectly; they give rise to repetitive dreams and uncontrollable flashbacks and generate narratives characterized by disjunction and distortion, including the interpolation of fantasy elements. The most faithful accounts of traumatic events, perversely, can only be rendered by means of narrative breaks and refusals, hyperbole, and other modes of distortion, as well as displacement at one or more removes. The horror genre can be said to generate just such perversely accurate representations of trauma. The genre specializes in hyperbolic scenarios of human subjects in the throes of excruciating physical and psychic pain, and develops these scenarios by means of hallucinatory narrative sequences. Moreover, the genre offers up trauma as a spectacle to be consumed and even enjoyed. This special issue of English Language Notes invites essays that explore the horror genre’s strategies for representing personal and historical trauma, its ability (or failure, or refusal) to abreact trauma, and its paradoxical appeal as a popular genre devoted to the unpleasure of shock, violence, and psychic disorientation. Other topics might include eco-horror and the postapocalypse from Mary Shelley to the Strugatsky brothers to Jeff VanderMeer; horror’s eliciting of “empathic unsettlement” (LaCapra 2001), as opposed to aversion, disgust, or other forms of denial; or critique of horror as an exploitative or “pornographic” genre, particularly in its representations of war, genocide, and other large-scale atrocities. Horror may overlap or intersect with other fantastic genres such as Gothic, Science Fiction, Kaidan, the Weird, and so forth. We welcome discussions of literature, film, television, graphic novels, visual arts, music, and other cultural forms, as well as essays that discuss 316 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) national and/or regional horror traditions as well as individual texts. Essays are due by September 1, 2020. They can be of varying lengths, including position papers and longer research articles. Use Chicago-style formatting and submit double-spaced, 12-point font, .docx files to the special-issue editor, Kelly Hurley . Please omit identifying information from all pages except the cover page, as we use a blind-review format. Send all inquiries to Kelly Hurley.—Kelly Hurley, University of Colorado at Boulder Technoculture: Call for Contributions. An online journal of technology in society, Technoculture invites submissions for its tenth-year anniversary issue. We seek critical essays and creative works from a range of academic disciplines that focus on cultural studies of technology—particularly the future of the study of technology and culture. We are interested in ideas that push beyond contemporary American culture and its fascination with computers. For the critical articles in this upcoming issue, we are especially interested in such questions as these: What is the future of the study of technology and culture? How can scholars of technoculture approach the past and/or the future of technology and technological advances? What new methodologies might be useful and how might scholars’ findings best be disseminated? What should critical and creative scholars recover and/or leave behind? How can authors push the boundaries...

Teachers’ understandings of empathy in teaching about the holocaust in Cyprus: The emotional risks of identification and the disruptive potential of ‘empathic unsettlement’

Teachers’ understandings of empathy in teaching about the holocaust in Cyprus: The emotional risks of identification and the disruptive potential of ‘empathic unsettlement’

History as anguish

This article proposes a path of reasoning capable of showing how history can become personal inasmuch as it produces the experience of anguish. To attain this goal, based on two concrete personal experiences during the current political context of Brazil, it will take the following steps: history becomes personal, first as it helps build one’s personality (as asserted in Johann Gustav Droysen’s Historik), by the ability of historical knowledge — produced by research or received by its readers — has to be morphological; in other words, via its ability to find unity in what, at first glance, seems to be dispersed. Secondly, history can become personal as it produces empathy, considered under Dominick LaCapra’s concept of empathic unsettlement. Finally, since LaCapra indicates that Primo Levi’s concept of gray zone contains certain possibilities in terms of empathic unsettlement, the final section of this article carries out an exercise about this notion to show that this type of experiences — limited to two specific cases in this study — invite us to think that history becomes personal in as much as it produces anguish, a notion that permeates The Drowned and the Saved (1986) — book that contains Primo Levi’s classic chapter on the gray zone.

Regret: A Vital Structure of Critical Engagement in Moral Education

I argue that helping college students to hone their faculty for regret is key to at least three interrelated functions of critical engagement in moral education: 1) empathic unsettlement; 2) counterfactual thinking; and 3) anagnorisis, Aristotle’s term for a tragic and too-late turn in self-awareness. All three functions support an attitude of humility and self-reflection germane to rigorous moral reflection. Though it can be difficult to confront and assume, I argue that claiming regret can help students to catalyze thinking, curiosity, and responsiveness in ways that bear under-explored potential in moral learning. In what follows, I defend regret as a vital structure of moral life, and give several examples of how regret might work to advance moral imagination in the classroom.

Perpetrator Trauma, Empathic Unsettlement, and the Uncanny: Conceptualizations of Perpetrators in South Africa’s Truth Commission Special Report

A fixed and reductionist “image” of the perpetrator in filmed media is one with which audiences are all too familiar, whether consciously or not. This article uses perpetrator trauma theory, empathic appeals, unsettlement, and the uncanny to explore the South African television programme Truth Commission Special Report in order to illustrate the ways in which the broadcast challenged or reified the conception of perpetrators as “monsters.” This will be exemplified through an analysis of several segments from the programme as it covered the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in transitional South Africa, and particularly its amnesty hearings of apartheid era perpetrators.

The Triumph of Olemaun: Survivance, Empathic Unsettlement, and Restorying the History of Canadian Residential Schools

The ignorance of many Canadians regarding residential schools and their traumatic legacy is emphasised in the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a foundational obstacle to achieving reconciliation. Many of the TRC's calls to action involve education that dispels and corrects this ignorance, and the commission demands ‘age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples' historical and contemporary contributions to Canada’ to be made ‘a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade Twelve students’ (Calls to Action 62.i). How to incorporate the history of residential schools in kindergarten and early elementary curricula has been much discussed, and one tool gaining traction is Indigenous-authored picturebooks about Canadian residential schools. This article conducts a close reading of Margaret Pokiak-Fenton and Christy Jordan-Fenton's picturebook When I Was Eight (2013). The picturebook gathers Indigenous and settler children together to contest master settler narratives regarding the history of residential schools. Using Gerald Vizenor's concept of ‘survivance’ and Dominick LaCapra's notion of ‘empathic unsettlement’, the article argues that picturebooks work to unsettle young readers empathetically as part of restorying settler myths about residential schools and implicating young readers in the work of reconciliation.

No laughing matter: humor and the Holocaust in Woody Allen, Shalom Auslander, and Howard Jacobson

ABSTRACTThe comic mode practised in Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy (2012), Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights (2006), and Woody Allen’s films conceals discrete approaches to history and memory in which the Holocaust collides with everyday life. The simultaneous activation of the pleasure principle and ethically charged guilt in these works creates a constant sense of empathic unsettlement that bears on questions about the future of memory. Humour ultimately belies an ironic intention on the part of the artist in question to articulate anxiety in the face of a contemporary culture increasingly desensitised to the meaning of history.

Don Quixote’s Quixotic Trauma Therapy: A Reassessment of Cervantes’s Canonical Novel and Trauma Studies

Abstract This article presents a non-canonical reading of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s canonical novel Don Quixote. Using a trauma theory lens (from both cultural studies and psychiatry) to understand the pre-Don Quixote character Alonso Quijano, this research first advances several new arguments as to why Quijano appears to have endured a traumatic experience of ageing. Instead of interpreting his obsessive behaviour as madness, it is argued that he engages in a form of both individual and collective therapy consisting of reading to educate himself about emotions; engaging the body in adventures; listening to others’ stories of traumatic suffering; and stimulating “empathic unsettlement” toward others and his previously traumatized self, one of the main critical suggestions advanced. This article takes an original turn in trauma studies too by putting forward that Quijano’s therapy is effective because it addresses the “central dialectic of psychological trauma.” He embarks on an imaginative and collective adventure of self-identity, transforming himself into another who is exempt from the traumatic experience; he knows without knowing and speaks without speaking. His trauma therapy occurs outside the reality of trauma or inside the “unreality” of creative expression, and this is how he endures a traumatic experience of ageing.

Desaparecidos, revenants e impostores en la novelística de Juana Salabert

This article offers an interpretation of two of Juana Salabert’s novels, Velodromo de Invierno and La noche ciega, in the light of the metaphorical employment of the figures of the disappeared, the revenant and the impostor within them. These spectral presences are traced as central to Salabert’s novelistic contribution to the current memory debates in Spain. Thus, Salabert connects the Spanish Civil War to the Holocaust in a multidirectional way in order to cast into relief the traumatic disappearances that they have left behind and to point to the intersection of Spanish and European history. Finally, Salabert’s aesthetic choices reveal her effort to eschew catharsis in favour of ‘empathic unsettlement’.

Placing second: Empathic unsettlement as a vehicle of consubstantiality at the Silent Gesture statue of Tommie Smith and John Carlos

In this article, I explore the material rhetorics of place from the perspective of transferential space. Specifically, I examine the Silent Gesture statue of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at San José State University. Drawing on Alison Landsberg’s concept of transferential space and Dominick LaCapra’s concept of empathic unsettlement, I argue that the statue explores the limits of identification in such a way that illuminates new possibilities for the rhetoricity of transferential space. Specifically, I argue that the statue’s invitation to physically and metaphorically ‘Take a Stand’ with Smith and Carlos facilitates noteworthy tensions of civic identity and, in turn, fosters mnemonic practices of consubstantiality with the disenfranchised for its visitors.

Teaching the Politics of Encounter

This article focuses on encounters within spaces of traumatic memory in Chile and considers how outsiders, primarily college students, engage with narrators in these sites. The article explores the concept of empathic unsettlement, including how and whether empathic unsettlement lasts and how it moves with people. Empathic unsettlement is that middle ground between engagement and disruption, a dynamic between the narrator and the listener, that jars, that unsettles, that reframes, in a productive way, that moves one toward understanding another, while making clear that the trauma or injury of another is beyond total understanding. The article searches for connection across difference, both sensitive to trauma and suggestive of ways trauma can be opened up, harnessed toward a solidaristic politics. Memory spaces offer such possibility.

‘Empathic unsettlement’ in the field of vision: Jo Ractliffe's Vlakplaas in photographs and video

I consider Jo Ractliffe's exploration, through photographic media and a video, of Vlakplaas, a site of apartheid-era subterfuge and violence. In the absence of an official historical archive about Vlakplaas, Ractliffe's practice engages with the violence, opacity and mediated narratives marking its presence historically. The work, an affective and performative intervention into historical and political spaces constituted by secrecy and erasure, might be imagined as an alternative archive. The artist's performative construction of photographs, which encompass visits to the site of Vlakplaas, and her own situated relationship to photographic practices in South Africa, is emphasised. I explore how Ractliffe re-imagines her Vlakplaas photographs through the video medium in order to elaborate on prior concerns with documentary photography and its truth claims. Criticism wielded against the artist's Vlakplaas photographs fails to consider the critical, conceptual, ethical and political capacities of the artwork's affective and empathetic response to a site that exists in an ongoing traumatic relation to apartheid-era violence. I mobilise Dominick LaCapra's (2001) concept of ‘empathic unsettlement’ and Jill Bennett's (2005) work on art and trauma, to argue for the work's particular capacities which reside in its refusal to objectify or speak on behalf of those tortured and killed, and for survivors transformed, in different ways, by lived experiences of racial violence and trauma in South Africa.