History and Theory 45 (October 2006), 397-415 Wesleyan University 2006 ISSN: 0018-2656

revIeW eSSayS


empathy IN hIStOry, empathIzINg WIth hUmaNIty
THE FRAGILITY OF EMPATHY AFTER THE HOLOCAUST. By Carolyn J. Dean. Ithaca,
Ny: Cornell University press, 2004. pp. 203.
HISTORY IN TRANSIT: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY, AND CRITICAL THEORY. By Dominick
LaCapra. Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University press, 2004. pp. 288.
In an age oriented around catastrophe and disaster, both natural and manmade,
scholarshistorians includedhave rediscovered the importance of pity and
compassion as a topic and a practice. Indeed, one of the most striking develop-
ments in more theoretical approaches to historical study of late has been the
appearance of a new category supposed to be central to it: empathy. the
imperative of empathy has emerged not simply as a burgeoning object of histori-
cal investigation, but also as a methodological requirement and as a normative
horizon of inquiry. everyone feels the pressure to empathize with the experi-
ence (and notably the suffering) of others, and the new proposal is that the com-
mandment to empathize therefore controls historians relations to their sources.
But what are the commandments rules and grounds?
In the reflections that follow, I would like to take up these questions by focus-
ing on important recent works by the historians Carolyn Dean and Dominick
LaCapra, both of whomclose enough in their mutual allegiance and historio-
graphical style to count as a schoolhave recently made the term and concept
of empathy central, indeed fundamental, to their thinking.
1
Of course, each
of the books under review repays deep engagement in its own right and for its
own reasons. But together they allow a study to be framed about what is new in
empathy and what is problematic about the concept.
I will begin by trying to situate their appeals to empathy historically, arguing
that their commitments and difficulties are best understood against the backdrop
of the post-enlightenment emotional regime of sympathy. that is, the prior
imperatives of pity, compassion, and sympathy are crucial for understanding
the more recent emergence of empathy. I will end by wondering how the con-
temporary interrogation of beliefs in dignity or humanitybeliefs that Dean
1. See, for example, Dominick LaCapra, review of Carolyn J. Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures:
Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject (Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University press,
1992), American Historical Review 99:1 (February 1994), 250-252, and Dean, Intellectual history
and the Prominence of Things that Matter, Rethinking History 8:4 (December 2004), 537-547. the
thoughts that I offer in this piece are in the margin of a full-scale essay on the history of humanitarian
idealism (including human rights) that I am in the early stages of researching and writing. For now,
thanks to peter eli gordon, martin Jay, and ethan Kleinberg.
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and LaCapra themselves often treat skepticallyallows for the continuation and
revival of empathic relations that they champion. the authors under review are
revivalists of empathy, but they have also left questions, to an extent that they
may fail to register, about its workings and its applicability and also about why
it is morallynot to mention historiographicallyobligatory. above all, there is
cause to wonder how to insist on empathy without a robust defense of the human-
ism that traditionally grounds it.
What, one might begin by asking, are the origins of the concept of empathy?
Deans book imaginatively focuses on empathy by studying fears of its exhaus-
tion and perversion. In a series of linked chapters, she investigates the ways in
which perceived failures of empathy are connected with pornography or homo-
sexuality, or how they are explained with an evolving concept of bystander
indifference. She provides illuminating capsule histories of these connections,
and admirably succeeds in her basic goal: defining the precariousness of
empathy as a particular cultural narrative and thus to constitute it as an object of
inquiry and discussion (15). LaCapras book, in a trademark contribution to the
field, is a series of related essays, but empathy prominently figures in it as never
before, either in LaCapras own work or in historical theory in general. Like
LaCapra, Dean says empathy is typically a phenomenon of the postwarand
especially of the post-holocaustworld. But while the concept enters into the
recent thought and writing of both authors as part of attempts to defend a his-
toriographical practice and more general ethic in approaching and representing
Nazi destruction of european Jewry, neither reflects too much on its actual ori-
gin. Of the two, only Dean gestures at the terminological and conceptual lineage
of empathy, and she says surprisingly little about it.
this is significant, and I want to suggest that their work is really not about
empathy except to the extent that that term now is simply an updated successor
to enlightenment sympathy. One possibility is that these authors are returning
experiential understanding to the epistemological centrality Wilhelm Dilthey
originally assigned it (though he barely used the term empathy and distinguished
his approach from it when he did).
2
But neither Dean nor LaCapra really engages
that old school. more important, neither seems interested in the actual concept of
empathy in a way that reflects the technical specificity and rich complications of
its origins and progress during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
3

2. the differences from that older school of thought, however, are legion. For example, Nacherleben
for Dilthey or reenactment for r. g. Collingwood assumed common rationality, not emotional
identifcation. Nevertheless, one may wonder if the new empathy escapes all the complaints made
against the older models, which indicted their weakness in explaining trends, unintended consequences,
structural regularities, etc. On the tradition of recapturing historical experience, see martin Jay, Songs
of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2004), chap. 6, and esp. 230 and note on Diltheys criticism of empathy.
3. For some indications of the wealth of these discussions, which suggest the need for their full
reconstruction, see the entry by Charles edward gauss in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. philip
Wiener (New York: Charles Scribners, 1972), s.v. Empathy. (Interestingly, there is no such entry in
the recent update to the dictionary.) See also the emerging scholarship of Susan Lanzoni on empathy,
for example, An Epistemology of the Clinic: Ludwig Binswangers Phenomenology of the Other,
Critical Inquiry 30:1 (Fall 2003), 160-186.
empathy IN hIStOry, empathIzINg WIth hUmaNIty
399
In her introduction, indeed, Dean notes that its present, post-1960s useinclud-
ing in her own workis no longer as a terminus technicus of various learned
disciplines but rather as a mass cultural imperative, originating in an age when
sympathy was first deemed a crucial component of an enlightened self (2). In
fact, there is little doubt that much unites empathy (though it originally arose in
philosophical aesthetics and only gradually took on its present meaning) with a
predecessor concept of sympathy, the conquering moral notion of the eighteenth-
century world.
Often assumed to be the age of reason, the enlightenment world also fig-
ured, and perhaps far more pervasively and prominently, as an age of feeling,
with sympathy, compassion, and pity as its central honorific concepts and emo-
tions. In this regard, it inaugurated a new moral universe, one especially striking
in comparison to the moral worlds that preceded itand especially abhorrent
to the internal critics it spawned. according to the famous literary historian
r. S. Crane, the turn toward the esteem and inculcation of sympathetic com-
passionthe movement now called sentimentalism by most scholars of the
ageappeared as something new in the worlda doctrine, or rather a complex
of doctrines, which a hundred years before 1750 would have been frowned upon,
had it ever been presented to them, by representatives of every school of ethical
or religious thought.
4
Sentimentalism broke so radically with the past because
no prior movements, whatever their other disagreements, had ever made com-
passionate response to others painespecially their physical sufferingthe
emblematic experience and emotional engine of individual and collective moral
life. Friedrich Nietzsche put the point about the radicalism of the change more
negatively and acerbically: this overestimation of and predilection for pity on
the part of modern philosophers is something new: hitherto philosophers have
been at one as to the worthlessness of pity.
5
and for better or for worse, the
revolution did not happen among philosophers alone.
the rise and return of sentimental humanitarianism for contemporary pub-
licsand in the new works under reviewmight initially seem to neglect the
terminological and presumably conceptual difference between sympathy and
empathy. Sympathy, of course, implies in greek what compassion implies in
Latin, suffering others situations or pain along with them. Empathy suggests a
more internalized understanding of or identification with such peoples states,
seeing things from their point of view or in their shoes. Where the former
seems to stop at the apparently necessary externality of two people to one anoth-
4. R. S. Crane, Suggestions towards a Genealogy of the Man of Feeling, ELH 1:3 (December
1934), 206-207. Its antecedents are, no doubt, in certain sectors of Christian spirituality. For an
important study, which presents itself as a history of empathy (though without any refection on the
recency of that term), see rachel Fulton, From Passion to Judgment: Devotion to Christ and the
Virgin Mary, 8001200 (New york: Columbia University press, 2002); see also Karl F. morrison,
Constructing Empathy (review of Fultons book), Journal of Religion 84:2 (april 2004), 264-270.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, transl. Walter Kaufmann and r. J. hollingdale
(New york: vintage, 1989), 19. In the words of his follower, hannah arendt, history tells us that it is
by no means a matter of course for the spectacle of misery to move men to pity. . . . [In] the eighteenth
century . . . , this age old indifference was about to disappear. arendt, On Revolution, new ed. (New
york: viking, 1965), 65.
SamUeL mOyN
400
er, the latter suggests the possibility of a self-transformation that allows partial
internality. this difference between these two meanings is brought out most
starkly by recalling the german words that are used to capture them: Mitleid and
Einfhlung. Unlike in english and in the romance languages (which empathy
entered as a translation from an original german coinage), the two german
words have no etymological relation. One might infer that the concepts are fun-
damentally differentperhaps at oddsbased on the adjectives they deploy to
describe the proximity of self and other: mit and ein, along-with and inside. and
yet, however much one might want to develop such a polar opposition, it turns
out that the contrast is not as clear as first appears, in a series of ways I would like
to explore in what follows. etymology does not control, for in spite of its distinct
origins and early uses, empathy operates in sympathys moral universe, and
it is subject to the same conceptual and ethical difficulties its predecessor has
always faced. above all, both share the same object: humanity.
One place to start is with the question of whether the fragility of empathy that
Dean puts center-stage is really foreign to the era of sympathy. [L]et a man
set himself to attend to, inquire out, and relieve distressed persons, an old
quotation runs, and he cannot but grow less and less sensibly affected with the
various miseries of life, with which he must become acquainted; when yet, at
the time, benevolence, considered not as a passion, but as a practical principle
of action will strengthen; and whilst he passively compassionates the distressed
less, he will acquire a greater aptitude actively to assist and befriend them. the
lines come from the eighteenth centurys Bishop Joseph Butler, one of the chief
members of the school of British moralists who rooted ethics in sentiment and
sympathy.
6
yet within this very school, as his words suggest, there arose a fear of
the crisis of emotion and a search beyond its limits. Devoting oneself to an ethic
of exposure and sensitivity to others suffering (or of engagement and action to
relieve it) might lead to a numbed ethical sense: compassion fatigue. the hope,
however, is that the very repetition of the caring that exhausts emotion will also
give rise to a habitual source of similar palliative action that continues in spite of
the disappearance of its original sourcefrom a morality driven by compassion,
in short, to a mechanism that no longer requires it.
Few would share Butlers optimism about the likelihood of such a seamless
transition in the moral life. But by one of the curious paradoxes of history,
Western publics have, thanks to a complicated series of transformations, returned
to his implicit fear of exhausted feeling and his search for some way to correct
for this diffculty. In the introduction to her book, Dean acknowledges that
sympathy embraced what we now call empathy, indeed that recent narratives
about empathys decline are in many ways continuous with older humanitarian
and sentimental discourses (6). But she suggests that there is still something
new and different about the compassion fatigue of the contemporary world.
[t]he newer discussion, she states, begins not with the aim of overcoming
6. Cited in Norman S. Fiering, Irresistible Compassion: an aspect of eighteenth-Century
Sympathy and humanitarianism, Journal of the History of Ideas 37:2 (april 1976), 213.
empathy IN hIStOry, empathIzINg WIth hUmaNIty
401
insuffcient empathy or unmasking hypocritical or disingenuous expressions of
itthough it seeks to do those things, toobut with a dramatic and widespread
conviction about the exhaustion of empathy and thus with numbness (6). Often
at fault are new media that create or at least compound the problem. this sense
of exhaustion, Dean argues, may represent something quite new in the history of
humanitarianism, for the diffculty is that people who acknowledge the potential
force of emotion nevertheless may feel nothing as a matter of fact (5).
and yet one might doubt, as I have already implied, how new the fear and
reality of exhaustion really is. On the one hand, sentimentalists clearly enter-
tained the basic possibility of wearied faculties (without so firm a conviction of
its accomplished reality). Bishop Butler, to take that single example, obviously
contemplated exhaustion, even if he found a reason not to bemoan its rise. he
did so since sentimentalists have always exploited new mediamost clas-
sically, the novel and the newspaperto instruct their less emotionally prone
fellows in sympathetic feeling, and it became relatively clear early in the history
of sentimental education that familiarity with suffering might breed contempt
for it.
7
Indeed, it may have been no accident that as early as the eighteenth
century a moral theorist such as Immanuel Kantto whom I will return later in
this essaycould already sense forbidding difficulties in rooting morality in the
sentiment of an agent who might feel others pain but who might also feel only
his own or no ones. Indeed, precisely the potential failure of sentiment led Kant
to leave sentimentalism behind. In a famous passage of his Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals, Kant imagined the case of the philanthropist who (in
Deans vivid words) might feel nothing or (in Kants more baroque phraseol-
ogy) might suffer from deadly insensibility before the plight of others, extinct
capacities precluding his moral intervention. the empathically numbed agent is,
in other words, the point of departure of modern moral philosophy, rather than
a recent appearance.
8
But on the other hand, it is, one might contend, a structural feature of the
modern regime of sympathetic feeling to be haunted by fragility. When what
one might call the sentimental revolution began, it is true, one occasionally found
among moral philosophers the easy assumption that humans are naturally caring.
So argued (for example) David hume, the earl of Shaftesbury, and adam Smith.

But none was so pollyannish as to be untroubled by threats to the sympathetic
emotions whose credentials they hoped to fortify. Conceptually speaking, the
concept of sympathy emerged in this era as a counterpoint to Thomas Hobbess
psychology, and all of his sentimentalist foes were at one in insisting that even
on his chosen terrain of the passions, vanity and envy were not all there was to be
seen. [N]atural affection, parental kindness, zeal for posterity, concern for the
propagation and nurture of the young, love of fellowship and company, compas-
7. See the huge literature on such topics by Geoffroy Atkinson, G. J. Barker-Benfeld, Michael Bell,
markman ellis, peter Uwe hohendahl, David marshall, John mullan, Janet todd, ann Jessie van Sant,
anne vincent-Buffault, and many, many others.
8. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, akademie 4: 398, in english
in Practical Philosophy, ed. and transl. mary gregor (Cambridge, eng.: Cambridge University press,
1996), 53-54.
SamUeL mOyN
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sion, mutual succour, and the rest of this kind, Shaftesbury found in man (and
woman), in addition to Hobbess vanity and envy. Let us suppose such a person
ever so selfish; let private interest have ingrossed ever so much his attention;
yet in instances, where that is not concerned, he must unavoidably feel some
propensity to the good of mankind, and make it an object of choice . . . [there
is] some particle of the dove, kneaded into our frame, along with the elements
of the wolf and serpent, hume insisted. howsoever selfish man may be sup-
posed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the
fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, Smith added. as
the citations indicate, all of these figures were sensitive enough to the power of
Hobbess account to present pity and sympathy as countervailing forces not full
replacements for the emotional fundaments of Hobbess agonistic man.
9
Only
rousseau took the more radical step of making sympathy the indisputable core
of human nature. But his new emphasis on corruption likewise reflected a keen
sense of sympathys weakness, even as he shifted human bellicosity from fact of
nature to construction of society.
No one, in short, could confirm the power of caring without acknowledging
its constitutive jeopardy as well. Dean suggests early on that the earlier theorists
were simply preoccupied with the effect that distance might have on caring for
suffering.
10
But that drastically underestimates the range and depth of their con-
cerns. Since sentimentalists were well aware of the fact that sentiment did not
rule the world, they were always haunted by the basic awareness that the emo-
tional solicitude for others that they prized counted as a very infirm and threat-
ened force. It is not clear to me what evidence there is, then, for the proposition
that concern about the fragility of empathy has only recently emerged. For
the more general and crucial point is to see that apprehension and fear about the
fragility or failure of compassion is premised wholly on its rise. Only after and
because sentimental humanitarianism came to be the moral horizon of modern
times could the fact that most people are insufficiently sensitive to the pains and
traumas of others begin to seem deplorable. empathy, one might say, has always
ruled through its threatened or realized absence.
None of this is to suggest that Dean is entirely wrong to link perceptions of
compassion fatigue (a phrase that Oxford English Dictionary lexicographers
have traced only as far back as 1968) to the contemporary moment, a muta-
tion related in turn to the recent rise of holocaust memory and victim culture.
rather, it is to argue that, though sentimentalist humanitarianism has undoubt-
edly occurred in a number of waves (of which the contemporary age is one),
with its power reactivated from time to time, compassion fatigue is one of its
9. the citations are from Lord Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times,
ed. Lawrence Klein (Cambridge, eng.: Cambridge University press, 1999), 192; David hume, An
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. J. B. Schneewind (Indianapolis: hackett, 1983),
74; and adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfe (Indianapolis:
Liberty Fund, 1982), 9.
10. On this, see the classic essay by Carlo ginzburg, Killing a Chinese mandarin: the moral
Implications of Distance, in Historical Change and Human Rights, ed. Olwen hufton (New york:
harperCollins, 1995), now reprinted in ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Refections on Distance (New
york: Columbia University press, 2001).
empathy IN hIStOry, empathIzINg WIth hUmaNIty
403
permanent structural components and constitutive problems. But there are many
other ways that the eighteenth-century turn to sympathy and pity, and its sequels
and consequences, provides the decisive frame of reference for thinking about
the contemporary turn to empathy, too.
What most obviously joins Dean and LaCapra is that they both think that empa-
thy allows a new understanding of the important (if narrow) relationship between
historians and their evidence. Of course, empathy for these figures is not simply
an ideal for historical understanding. Indeed, it is only an ideal for historical
understanding insofar (presumably) as it follows from a general ethic. this more
embracing imperative controls not simply historians relationship with sources;
it commands the empathic treatment of any and all objects by any and all agents.
therefore, a focused discussion of their application of empathy to historical
practice is also a look at the concepts general ramifications.
In her volume of interrelated essays, Dean offers a chapter on empathy in
professional historiography of the holocaust, brilliantly carried out through
an examination of a topic about which there seemed little else to say: Daniel
Jonah Goldhagens Hitlers Willing Executioners and the controversy it set off.
Intending to force the reader to come to grips with perpetrator hatred as well as
victim suffering, Goldhagens text included a number of surprisingly unguarded
episodes of gore. Dean shows that a series of prominent historians attacked
Goldhagens grotesque or even pornographic illustrations of Nazi sadism as
a case of false empathy. For many historians, Dean reveals, the graphic indul-
gences of Goldhagens book explained its popularity more than anything else.
More important, Goldhagens sensationalism took him beyond the permissible
limits of disinterested inquiry. Commercialized and spectacularized, with the
holocaust as horror film (as LaCapra notes in a related treatment, goldhagen
seemed to have a curious penchant for settling on cases of young girls as vic-
tims), Hitlers Willing Executioners invited an easy dismissal as kitsch that
avoided true historical empathy with the victims available through hard-won and
dispassionate scholarship.
11
For Dean, however, most such responses themselves illustrated the same
shortcoming. vituperating goldhagen, she claims, actually involved a refusal
to confront this ambivalent identification as a problem common to most repre-
sentations of the horror of the holocaust and of all mass atrocities (51). though
wisely counseling against the exploitation of the reader through either senti-
mentalizing allegiance to the victims or stigmatizing rejection of their sadistic
executioners, Goldhagens critics beg[ged] the question of what a nonexploit-
ative approach to the subject might be (53). In doing so, they avoid a number of
serious quandaries and the discovery of true empathy.
How so? Most historians, Dean shows, implicitly agreed that too much emo-
tioncompassion or sadismactually signified too little, a voyeuristic atti-
tude that involved detachment rather than involvement in the brutal events. But
11. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns hopkins University press, 2001),
118, in the midst of a chapter covering similar material.
SamUeL mOyN
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that could not mean that historians operate with total dispassion, an objectivist
attitude of total detachment from the events, for then the same result would be
reached through a different route. after all, many of the most serious historians
acknowledged that Goldhagens rude shift of focus revealed the limitations of a
historiography that did not (at least sometimes) empathize. Indeed, the dominant
methodological approach to the holocaust, by banishing empathy through detach-
ment, led to narratives of violence that simply paved the way for Goldhagens
equal and opposite error by reiterat[ing] the impersonality and objectification
of Nazi crime on the level of narrative form (58). Overinvestment responded to
detachment. And yet, most historians in the end responded to Goldhagens emo-
tionalism by replacing false empathy with none, what Dean calls a positivist
change of focus rather than theoretical and methodological challenges to the way
historians write (5). [t]he real challenge, Dean forcefully observes, was how
to fashion a language at least capable of conveying the difficulty of disentangling
moral numbness . . . and moral integrity, or even one that successfully achieves
rather than falsely avoids empathy (54).
In her detailed chapter, Dean goes on to examine historians who have tried,
like Goldhagen, to take the victims point of view, while realizing the futility
and immorality of taking the victims place (67, 73). Dean begins by reject-
ing Inga Clendinnens well-meaning endeavor to empathize with the victims by
recovering the normalcy of their attempts to face down cruelty, affirming life
even as they were sent to death. For Dean, this version of identification in the
name of secular redemption, a strategy by which the historian snatches uplift-
ing conclusions from the jaws of horror, avoids what empathy with the damned
should really achieve. The invocation of humanity in [Clendinnens] book,
Dean puts her case, limits our ability to assess and analyze the experiences of
victims by sending them symbolically to heaven (67). In contrast, her colleague
Omer Bartov emerges as the better exemplar of empathy because he takes the
uncanny nature of the holocaust as his point of departure rather than as an argu-
ment to be refuted (68). the lesson of empathizing with the victims, as one
learns it from Bartovs works, is not about human resilience and nobility but
about human frailty and the fragility of human dignity (71-72). going beyond
goldhagen and even Clendinnen, Bartov shows how to invest sympathetic emo-
tions without exhausting them: the way to dignify the terrorized dead and to
empathize with their suffering is to recognize the difficulty of the task (without
giving up on it) and the fragility of the object (without relinquishing it).
It is here that the difficulties of the turn to empathy emerge more clearly, for
Deans arguments reflect unspoken assumptions of what might and what might
not count as empathy that bear the closest examination. at this point, indeed, one
might begin to wonder what the authority is for deciding when attempts at empa-
thy err. after all, many victims in history have claimed to learn that the lesson
of their experience is triumph, including in the Holocausts aftermath.
12
What if
12. For one example of a highly pluralistic response to the holocaust, including a brief discussion
of whether a commitment to empathy might override rather than respect the plural possible responses,
see my study, A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (Waltham, ma:
Brandeis University press, 2005).
empathy IN hIStOry, empathIzINg WIth hUmaNIty
405
a victim insists on redemption, whether personal or theological or revolutionary
or nationalist? What if a victim feels her ability to survive illustrates her capacity
to sustain horror with resolve, or concludes that her story vindicates the premise
of Gods benevolent providence? What if another takes it to illustrate the sem-
piternity of his people or the need for socialist revolution? What if it illustrates
the ability to put the past, for all its scarring, behind for good? What, indeed, if
some victims wanted to be sent to heaven? How can an empathic approach cut
through the plurality of possible and actual responses to painsome people learn
the message of redemption while others might insist on gnawing victimhoodin
order to insist on the moral viability of one alone? What kind of empathy turns
out to be the vehicle of a contested set of values, one only a few victims have
preferred? Have historians failed to empathize when they have dignified and
redeemed their sources, or does the command to empathize turn out to be simply
a statement of normsones that the holocaust does not univocally teach, but
that may come from somewhere else, and are only applied to it?
If there is a response to these questions, it will have to be found LaCapras work,
for it is the source of Deans position, and he more than anyone else has tried
to give empathy whatever theoretical content it currently has in contemporary
historical reflection. (Indeed, Dean is careful to defend LaCapra from Bartovs
remark that theoretical approaches to history like LaCapras own tend, because
of their highflown abstraction, to foresake empathy.)
13
In LaCapras thought,
one might initially observe, empathy is a successor or supplementary concept,
following now upon a long train of models for thinking about the epistemologi-
cal and normative problem of how the historian relates to his object. But it is no
accident that empathy shows up in this series as a core concept of LaCapras turn
to the holocaust as an object of study. For more particularly, LaCapra introduces
empathy to think about the Holocaust narrators relationship with his traumatized
sources, having discussed it only in his last two books on the subject as well as
giving it center stage in a recent autobiographical essay.
14

But the concept is
now prominent enough to run through the book under review like a leitmotif (for
13. Compare Dean, The Fragility of Empathy, 157, n. 4 with Dean, Intellectual history, 541.
14. So far as I can tell, LaCapra did occasionally use the term empathy earlier in his career;
but after his turn to the holocaust as a subject, the word slowly began to take on new meaning and
gained in prominence. See LaCapra, Madame Bovary on Trial (Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University
press, 1982), where empathy is contrasted with irony; Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory,
Trauma (Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University press, 1994), 51-52, where andreas hillgruber is attacked
for selectively empathizing with german soldiers on the eastern front; and History and Memory after
Auschwitz (Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University press, 1998), chap. 4, where Shoshana Felman and Claude
Lanzmann are criticized for excessive empathy (a relation that for LaCapra, as I will note below, must
also involve critical detachment). See also LaCapra, tropisms of Intellectual history, Rethinking
History 8:4 (December 2004), 517 in which he describes the holocaust books as a reorientation
in his career prompted by his participation at the famous conference organized by Saul Friedlander
that gave rise to Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, ed. Saul
Friedlander (Cambridge, ma: harvard University press, 1992). this general interpretation is, how-
ever, significantly undercut by his long-term interest in scapegoating and victimization, notably his
proposal to extend empathy beyond humans to massacred cats, and his refusal to empathize (as robert
Darnton had done) with their gleefully willing executioners. See LaCapra, Chartier, Darnton, and the
great Symbol massacre, Journal of Modern History 60:1 (march 1988), 95, 103-104, a piece later
reprinted in LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University press, 1989).
SamUeL mOyN
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example, 64-66, 76-77, 133-137). even so, his writing about it makes clear that
it is not to be restricted to such holocaust or trauma-related sources (even if the
need for it is most obvious there). In fact, it represents a new model for negotiat-
ing the epistemological and normative quandaries of historical representation in
general.
LaCapras career began in an acceptance and a rejection of the metahistori-
cal turn of hayden White, whose aestheticist theory of historiography posed a
particularly severe threat to the integrity of sources insofar as the record consist-
ed of human witnesses. White, one might say very precisely, offered a theory of
historiography with no room for empathy whatever, in which the inspired artistry
of the narrator reigns supreme, perhaps limited by the facts but unchecked by any
ethic of solicitude for the human sources he might draw upon as if they were inert
materials arrayed on his palette for use. In response to this apparent problem, and
throughout his career, LaCapra has advocated a strategy of compromise between
the passive reception of reality by the normally self-effacing factologist and
the activist, even demiurgic creativity of Whites empowered narrator, called
to assign meaning through the selection of the facts and their emplotment. But
LaCapras model of compromise has varied widely over the years with his own
evolution, so that deconstructive reading, interpersonal dialogue, and psycho-
analytic transference have all been called upon to provide a model or theory of
mediation.
Continuing to stress that his commendable quest for a middle path should
not be confused with the radically constructivist positions taken by hayden
White, LaCapra presents empathy as a mode of historical understanding that
can correctly acknowledge historians authority as thinkers and craftspeople
without untethering them from their factual sources.
15
Further, LaCapra sug-
gests the need to avoid both the Scylla of absorbing oneself in the traumatized
self-understanding of victims but also the Charybdis of any attempt to derive
reassurance or benefit (for example, unearned confidence about the ability of
the human spirit to endure any adversity with dignity and nobility).
16
as noted
before, such claims are the proximate source of Deans normative orientation:
one may not relive the suffering of ones traumatized sources, victimizing one-
self, nor send them to heaven by saying they died for a good cause or in order
to teach uplifting lessons. this is what Clendinnen, for example, did wrong.
Such rules about and verdicts on what might and might not constitute successful
empathizing suggest that recent discussions of empathy are bound up inindeed
grounded ona normative theory that they do not openly advertise or justify. In
any case, they consist in the superimposition of a specific philosophical vision
on the plurality of possible responses to personal and collective tragedy. What
precisely is empathy, what does it command, what are it principles? Is it a con-
cept of empathy itself that provides answers to such questions? Or is it rather or
really the implicit values that its defenders want empathy to reflect and to further
that explain its current uses?
15. LaCapra, Writing History, 35, note; 37-42; cf. 102-104.
16. Ibid., 41-42. Dean cites an earlier but similar expression of the same idea (44 and 158, n. 5).
empathy IN hIStOry, empathIzINg WIth hUmaNIty
407
In perhaps his clearest formulation, LaCapra writes:
empathy, as I have construed the term, is to be disengaged from its traditional insertion
in a binary logic of identity and difference. In terms of this questionable logic, empathy is
mistakenly conflated with identification or fusion with the other; it is opposed to sympa-
thy implying difference from the discrete other who is the object of pity, charity, or con-
descension. In contradistinction to this entire frame of reference, empathy should rather
be understood in terms of an affective relation, rapport, or bond with the other recognized
and respected as other.
17
the quotation is crucial, for it affords the reader the best available sense of the
content of empathy as a moral and historiographical ideal, even if it remains
exceedingly vague and not easily reducible to rules or applicable in any straight-
forward way. Nevertheless, the main thrust of the concept is clear. against the
fusion or identification that effaces boundaries and the detachment or sympa-
thy that demands them, empathy properly combines similarity and difference.
Fusion would presumably mean forging an emotional link with the other that
usurped his place as if it were yours too, while detachment would presumably
involve the reverse error of caring about others pain precisely because you are
not involved in it. For her part, Dean interestingly suggests that this sense of
error is what is involved in the frequent belief that holocaust representations
have become pornographic, as well as in the persistent if evolving attempt to
link Nazism to homosexuality. the accusation of pornography, she says, often
really means the accusation of selfishness regarding the pain of others, in which
we voyeurs appropriat[e] suffering for our own pleasure and the inflation
of the narcissistic self, an operation that can also provide the gratification of
not-having-been a victim. (26, 36, 19). Similarly, the long discourse of the
homosexual Nazi or the gay hitler is related to the belief that not only watching
evil but doing evil is a form of illicit and deviant pleasure.
Neither Dean nor LaCapra saysapparently does not have to saywhat is
wrong with either excessive fusion or detachment. One can begin to come to
grips with the rules of empathy by insisting, once again, on its place in the history
of sympathy. there is, as many will recall, an ancient Western defense of moral
detachment from and immunity to others (including their pain) that sentimental-
ism began by overcoming, to the point that it is very difficult now to avoid the
moral expectation of caring about others. the current deference accorded to
empathy assumes, rather than explains and argues, the moral unintelligibility
of immunity that remains one of sentimentalisms most incontestable victories,
severing modern beliefs definitively from many antique ethical systems.
18
In
fact, LaCapra suggests that the problem with detachment is actually that it is
too close to absorption in its flirtation with selfishness and self-aggrandizement:
17. LaCapra, Writing History, 212-213.
18. the brief for detachment is as old as greek and hellenistic philosophy and is immortalized in
the famous passage of Lucretiuss De rerum natura, Book II, that suggests how sweet it is to watch a
shipwreck since one is fortunately not involved. and it has had many defenders in history, even if it
now seems forbidden or unintelligible. Cf. hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of
a Metaphor of Existence, transl. Steven rendall (Cambridge, ma: mIt press, 1997).
SamUeL mOyN
408
he makes no distinction between immunity to the world and vain self-love. the
charges are that sympathy might appropriatively and possessively convert the
suffering of others into a selfish if secret occasion for vicarious pleasurethe
gratification of avoiding the pain of the suffering, or of enjoying the self-image
that results from the aid. yet these charges were first deployed by sentimentalists
against the potential failures and perversions of their own concept of sympathy.
In other words, it is in part the cult of sympathy that LaCapra says needs to be
transcended, one so thoroughly responsible for many basic moral intuitions in the
contemporary world, that explains what he says empathy has to involve. When it
comes to the resistance to selfish fusion, sympathy is empathys content.
Sentimentalist thought, in fact, developed through an epic battle not just with
hobbes but also, in a second stage, with Bernard mandeville and Franois de La
rochefoucauld, who with vivid rhetoric and disquieting psychological sophisti-
cation raised the challenge for sentimentalism that selfishness might lay at the
root of putatively natural other-regard. Of course, in a longer view, the basic
project of freeing interpersonal relations from the imperative of selfish gratifica-
tion (placing law above the body in biblical thought or rooting charity deeper
than concupiscence in St. Augustines updated terms) is as old as Western civi-
lization. But in its humanitarian turn sentimentalism both secularized the debate
by framing the difficulty naturalistically and psychologically and made it an
evangelizing cultural program.
19
Sympathy was theorized and promoted, in this
epoch-making moral reorientation, precisely against the lurking threat of selfish
fusion rather than secretly in its name. In other words, the terms in which the new
concept of empathy is distinguished from the old both beg the question of how
it is different and rehearse familiar threats to sympathy first sensed by its own
proponents. as with compassion fatigue, then, it is not clear what is new here,
why the conscience is (in Deans words) recently fraught (40).
the point is not simply historical, for setting empathy in the longer and con-
tinuing era of sympathy reveals some of the serious conceptual and perhaps even
normative limitations to the putatively new concept. It bears mentioning in pass-
ing that the historical perspective suggests the need for a theory of how empathy
works, that is, what the psychic, phenomenological, or other mechanisms are
that allow an empathic intersubjective bond. LaCapra writes as if sympathy
and identification were antonyms, but as a matter of fact the notion of identi-
fication responded first and primarily, in the history of ideas, to the explanatory
problem in the discourse of sympathy of what mechanisms and modalities might
19. as David Brion Davis and others long ago stressed, this program paid off, among other ways,
in the abolition of slavery. See Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, Ny: Cornell
University press, 1966). the most prominent recent popular histories of humanitarianism have
explicitly placed the development of empathy center-stage. See adam hochschild, King Leopolds
Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1998)
and Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empires Slaves (Boston: houghton
Miffin, 2005).
20. As Pierre Force has shown, Rousseau apparently invented the notion of identifcation in the
relevant sense as part of his account of how pity worked. See Force, Self-Love, pity, and the Origins
of political economy, Yale French Studies 92 (1997), 46-64. For his development of the issues,
see Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge, eng:
Cambridge University press, 2003), chap. 1.
empathy IN hIStOry, empathIzINg WIth hUmaNIty
409
account for concern for the other.
20
In this regard, sympathy did not simply antic-
ipate empathy. Its superior conceptual development in its time in a sense poses
a useful challenge to its successor: for it is not clear how empathy could work
without some kind of identification. But then it seems false to define empathy as
beyond intersubjective identification altogether. LaCapras distinction of empa-
thy from self-aggrandizing sympathy suggests as much.
21
For his part, LaCapra
is unclear whether empathy avoids internalization or simply remains sufficiently
external to its objectin spite of the very internalization that the etymology of
empathy impliesto be superior.
more important, the historical perspective allows my repeated questionwhat
authorizes the normative judgment that some attempts at empathy are good or
successful and others are not?to be seen in a new and potentially trying light.
Empathy, on LaCapras terms, is a form of affective investment that allows both
for the recognition of the others point of view and preserves a space for criticiz-
ing that point of view. According to the evidence provided by LaCapras specific
uses of the term, it is a concept with normative content, allowing for the approval
of some representations of the holocaust and (much more often) justifying the
rejection of others. For example, one cannot convert ones investment in victims
into a vindication of uplifting heroes, or ones preferred nation, or humanity
in general. At some points, it seems as if empathy is welcomed in LaCapras
thought about traumatized sources only if one empathizes with the suffering of
horror-filled witnesses without attempting to wrest affirmation from their stories,
and Deans application of his arguments in this spirit lends credence to this con-
clusion. But the normative commitments that lay behind such prohibitions and
affirmationsworthwhile as they no doubt areremain rather mysterious, and
their theoretical justification seems basically absent.
the longer history of sentiment reveals this difficulty to be one that empathy
inherits from sympathy. For LaCapras current theory offers a pathologizing
approach that continues, in the tradition of sentimentalism, to work according
to the logic of health and illness. Where once sympathy was contrasted with
perversion, now working-through is favored over acting-out, achieved empathy
prized over corrupted empathy. In this regard, LaCapras internalization of
his concept of empathy to his continuing and immensely creative psychoana-
lytic rendering of the historians transferential relationship to his sources is
both suggestive and revealing. Of course, there is an uneasiness to the connec-
tion between the old and new models. Sigmund Freud did not use the term or
concept of empathy in its present sense. Only later, most significantly in heinz
Kohuts self psychology, did the specific language of empathy find a similar
place as in LaCapras thought as a replacement for Freuds originally scientistic
21. Similarly, LaCapras earlier usage criticized not identifcation as such but full identifcation.
See, for example, LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, 111. It may help to note that
identifcation also played a role in classical phenomenological accounts of Einfhlung or empathy as
presented, for instance, in Edmund Husserls Cartesian Meditations. See, among many other works,
Jean-Luc petit, Solipsisme et intersubjectivit: Quinze leons sur Husserl et Wittgenstein (paris: Cerf,
1996).
SamUeL mOyN
410
rhetoric. But, as LaCapra well knows, psychoanalysis in its original rendition
(and even more in Jacques Lacans variant of it that Dean made the subject of
her first book) promoted a certain brand of hostility between the analyst and the
analysand in order to keep care for the other from devolving into absorption in
his pathology.
22
LaCapra has gestured at the need for such affective distance
or what one might call tough love in his treatment of empathic relations to
sources: empathy is in this sense an opening to the other that is related to
transferential implication. . . . [e]mpathy, including the active acknowledgement
of otherness, is crucial for responsive historical understanding, and it does not
exclude the attempt to take critical distance when warranted.
23
But when is it
warranted? When to be tough and when to love? The thought-provoking plan to
update psychoanalysis with sentiment by itself does not explain how to find the
right balance between the two.
the key point, therefore, is that empathy in contemporary historical theory
seems poised to resume sympathys lack of justificatory foundations and to leave
the ethics it assumes without explanation. and it was precisely this shortcoming,
after all, that led Kant to break with it. Kant drank deeply at the well of eigh-
teenth-century sentimentalism: indeed, he gave high praise to one of its most
important exponents, Francis hutcheson, in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics
of Morals, crediting the sentimentalist tradition for focusing in a new and salu-
tary way on the problem of motivation in the moral life. Unfortunately, Kant
concluded, sentimentalism left the problem of obligation wholly unexplained.
Nature is not normative. It is not enough to say your preferred emotions are
healthy while those you reject are sick. very roughly, Kant argued that to prem-
ise morality on the putative normativity of fellow feeling (or any other fact of
nature, however widely accepted) is to premise it on optional or hypothetical
rather than necessary or categorical grounds and thus to achieve a merely
conditional moralityin other words, none at all. From this point of view, to
return to my epigraph, Kants thought simply extended Butlers drift beyond the
point he or other sentimentalists were willing to take it, indeed beyond sentiment
altogether. Butler imagined a turn from passions to principles out of the fear of
22. For some of the issues, see george W. pigman, Freud and the history of empathy,
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 76:2 (1995), 237-256 and the special issue on empathy
of the Revue franaise de la psychanalyse 68:3 (July 2004). For Kohuts introduction of empathy,
see Kohut, Introspection, empathy, and psychoanalysis, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association 7 (1959), 459-483. generally speaking, when Freud used the term empathy, it was in the
sense of the technical discussions of the time, while Kohut introduced in psychoanalysis the diffuse
turn toward empathy as a matter of interpersonal caring.
23. LaCapra, tropisms, 503.
24. Whether the switch to a duty-based morality precludes emotional guidance is, of course, a
classic discussion point about the Groundworks early examples. On this question, see, for instance,
Barbara herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, ma: harvard University press,
1993), chap. 2. meanwhile, in a long series of publications, martha Nussbaum has proposed that
the original sentimentalists of greece had the best modelapparently largely lost by the time of
modern sentimentalism and Kants critique of itthat understood emotions not as blind surges but as
upheavals of thought that are intellectually infected. See Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The
Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, eng.: Cambridge University press, 2003), esp. part II on pity
and compassion.
empathy IN hIStOry, empathIzINg WIth hUmaNIty
411
declining motivation and compassion fatigue. Kant, in contrast, made the same
turn out of a worry about shaky foundations or non-existent justification.
24
the reason he did so, of course, is not simply in order to make explicit the
reasons explaining what natural sentiment already reliably did. as noted, not
everyone might have the right feelings, and some might have none at all. more
important, there were hard cases in which it was not clear what empathy dictated.
Without the theory he turned away from sentimentalism to find, Kant thought,
morality would also lack a theory of application and extension.
25
that is to say,
founding morality in a healthy emotional set-up or function remained, to refer
to Butlers useful words again, theoretically passive rather than active. affect
surges when it does (or not) while the moral life requires deliberation in need
and doubt. It seems to me, to bring the Kantian concern to bear on the defend-
ers of empathy in recent historical theory, that their work offers a moving and
potentially defensible sense of historians moral and affective obligations to
their sources. the trouble is that this sense remains unexpectedly left without a
theory, in the same sense that Kant thought sentimentalism was. For this reason,
the new concept often seems to import a large number of normative assump-
tions into prescriptions of what empathy demands and forbids in historiography.
But it does not explain the superiority of these assumptions compared to others:
why they ought to be binding where others are not. Finally, it begs crucial ques-
tions about what empathy dictates in casesfor example, that of perpetrators
who might seem difficult candidates for affective bondingthat (as LaCapra
acknowledges) are not obvious.
26
anyway, it is wholly unclear what it would
mean to empathize with sources that are not easily personalized, either in a way
that makes emotional investment straightforward and compelling or one that
makes it counterintuitive and daunting.
Of course, this story does not account for all of the content that empathy has in
current historical theory, notably not the extreme constriction of the affirmation
of humanity on which Dean and LaCapra insist. paradoxically, however, that
constriction emerges from a critique of the humanist foundation of sympathy
that undermines, as much as it prepares, any possible defense of empathy. For
there are other and deeper criticisms than the friendly ones Kant directed at
sentimentalism. Kant hoped to reconstruct and reground sentimentalism. But
later antagonists, from Nietzsche to poststructuralists, have concluded that the
flaw in sentimentalism is not its lack of rules and grounds but, more deeply, its
very object. What one empathizes with, humanitarianism instructs, is anothers
humanity, often figured as sacred dignity or bodily integrity. Both dimensions
of humanity were central to sentimentalism in its origins, and Kant simply
25. [m]orals themselves remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we are without that
clue and supreme norm by which to appraise them correctly. Kant, Groundwork, akademie 4: 390,
in english in Practical Philosophy, 45.
26. LaCapra, Tropisms, 516. What LaCapra has said on this admittedly diffcult matter thus far is
as follows: to put the point with extreme brevity and without any pretense at conclusiveness, I think
that empathy with the perpetrator involves the recognition that, under certain conditions, extreme
acts might be possible for oneself, while empathy with the victim involves respect and compassion
that are not tantamount to identifcation or speaking for the other (ibid., 525, n. 19).
SamUeL mOyN
412
resumed these notions in his Groundwork when he referred to humanity not just
as akin to the holy object that it is sacrilegious to morally degrade, but also as
what it is emblematically wrong to physically maim, damage, or kill.
27
In her introduction, Dean suggests what might be the most disconcerting
outcome of facing empathys limits. Her studies, she contends, document
an important challenge to the liberal ideal that we can empathically project ourselves into
others with whom we share a common humanity, whether strangers or neighbors. For
numbness is not only a psychological form of self-protective dissociation; it is arguably a
new, highly self-conscious narrative about the collective constriction of moral availability,
if not empathy, and may thus constrain humanist aspirations in ways we do not yet
recognize. (5)
But she appears to shy away from the possibility that a critical investigation of
the concept might reveal not simply the blurred frontiers or exhausted energies
of empathy but the bankruptcy of its very object. even so, while she follows
LaCapra in defending empathy only on condition that it not lead too easily to
the conviction of humanity triumphant, she worries that his strictures may leave
too little to empathize with or care about, if nothing of the beliefs in dignity and
humanity that traditionally have been the objects both of sympathy and empathy
might survive. [I]s redemption bound to narcissism, elation, and other defenses
against anxiety such that its dangers always outweigh its promises? she asks
him in her most recent essay. Or [c]an an emphasis on the recovery of meaning
and redemption mobilize identification with a normative ideal of humanity on
the basis of which appeals can be made to our responsibilities as empathic human
beings and citizens?
28
The normative value of humanity grounded sympathy, but empathys defend-
ers are uncertain about that grounds viability. Does empathy really replace
sympathy, by moving to a different ground, or really reflect a hesitation about
whether or not to occupy that groundand whether or not to give it up? And so
one could put empathys contemporary quandary this way. A critique of human-
ism, one especially prominent in twentieth-century Continental thought, provides
the warrant for the hostility to redemptive responses to the holocaust (to which
it is retroactively applied) just as it leads to an insistence that true empathy must
involve recognition of its difficulty. But influenced by poststructuralism though
they are, both Dean and LaCapra nevertheless want to emerge as humanists
enough to see empathizing, rooted as it is in a belief in humanity as a moral
ground, as a justifiable and indeed obligatory activity. If sympathy is outmoded,
27. Kant, Groundwork, akademie 4: 429, in english in Practical Philosophy, 80.
28. Dean, Intellectual History, 545-546. Note the use of the term identifcation.
29. It is true that Dean occasionally says that her goal is restricted to analysis of how fear of
empathys exhaustion is discussed and explained, rather than (like LaCapra) actually suggesting that
the fear is legitimate and that empathy needs to be amplifed (4; 155, n. 69). Yet her book is evidently
premised on the notion that a strengthening of empathy or discovering how to forge a critical usage of
empathy is pressing (38). meanwhile, the goal of her historiographical discussion is not to identify the
shortcomings of a culture and historiography of empathy but rather to rank performances of empathy
on a scale of comparative success. In her discussion of empathy in historiography, the example I have
discussed, Deans efforts turn out to be reconstructivesearching for the formula for empathizing in
historical writing on the evident assumption that it is a good (if elusive) quality to achieve.
empathy IN hIStOry, empathIzINg WIth hUmaNIty
413
it is because of its easy assumption of the value of humanity. yet in turning to
empathy, they refuse to fully dispense with sympathys own object.
29

In her book, Dean cites the contemporary thinker giorgio agamben for having
taken the radical step of dropping human dignity as the central moral concept
informing humanitarianism and human rights throughout modern times (7,
141, n. 22). For agamben, humanity as an ideal did not survive auschwitz, and
continuing to empathize is to miss the point and the lesson of that disastrous site.
So it is curious that Dean does not explain in her book why she thinks humanity
remains a viable object of empathy. the question of the exhaustion of the subject
of empathy or the boundaries of its object remains different from the question of
empathys basic viability. For his part, in his own essay on Agamben in his text,
LaCapra also approaches and avoids the diffculty that the project of empathy
may run aground because its very object is misconceived. But he does so in a
more intricate and illuminating way.
agamben has written that auschwitz revealed that the horror in the camps
turned not only or not so much on the death of humans as on the erasure of an
intelligible line between the human and the inhuman. If so, he would seem to
imply, there is nothing left to empathize with in those terrible circumstances, and
to deploy empathy is to forsake the victims rather than truly to face up to what
they suffered. auschwitz is the site of an experiment that remains unthought
today, agamben writes, an experiment beyond life and death in which . . . the
human being [is turned] into a non-human. What therefore matters for agamben
about the Muselmann, the camp figure whom he takes to illustrate these claims,
is very precisely that he is no longer a Mann at all. even other camp inmates
often shunned him, rather than empathized with him, and agamben believes it
is telling that those whom he considers the most extreme victims were those
without humanity. there is therefore no cause, at least anymore, to empathize
with victims on the grounds of their trampled but somehow sustained dignity. So
agamben explicitly argues that moralities based on human dignity have seen
their day. yet more seriously, auschwitza site impossible to locate fully in one
hellish placebroke civilization not just temporarily but for good, and it tells
a harsh truth about a continuing modernity in which the exception became the
norm.
30
If he is right, it would also seem to follow that a sentimentalist culture of
sympathy or empathy is morally bankrupt now and forever. Butlers feelings and
Kants rules which for all their differences sought the same objectare simply
no longer up to the post-auschwitz calamity of the world now.
It is of the essence that LaCapras response to Agamben does not take the
form of a positive defense of empathizing with humanity. as I have noted, he
30. giorgio agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, transl. Daniel heller-
roazen (New york: zone Books, 2001), 52; he likewise writes that the Muselmann is not only or
not so much a limit between life and death; rather, he marks the threshold between the human and
the inhuman (ibid., 55). On the origins and contemporary signifcance of the reversal of norm and
exception, see agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, transl. Daniel heller-roazen
(Stanford: Stanford University press, 1998) and agamben, State of Exception, transl. Kevin attell
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). On the diffculties of the inherited Western boundary
between humanity and animality, see agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, transl. Kevin attell
(Stanford: Stanford University press, 2004).
SamUeL mOyN
414
has made this self-imposed task quite difficult precisely because his vision of
empathy is so resistant to the very redemptive humanism that empathy would
seem to presuppose. Instead, LaCapra criticizes agamben for in effect sur-
reptitiously pursuing redemption in a reversed form as unavailable, absent, or
repeatedly and aporetically in question (144). to summarize his chapter with
undue brevity, LaCapra plausibly charges that agamben continues to appeal to
the values of sublimity and redemption, simply in covert and negated form. at
most, LaCapra goes beyond this negative defense of empathizing with human-
ity, to explain why appeals to the humanity of the victims retain some validity,
by saying that giving testimonywhich the Muselmann did not doremained a
means for the victimized to turn themselves slowly into the survivor and agent
(176). the implication seems to be that this transit away from total abjection and
victimization is (however difficult and evanescent) a step toward the reaffirma-
tion of humanity in which observers and historians can and should find value
and even the essential point of their activity. But LaCapra does not even say this
much about what moral content humanity might have after auschwitz and thus
what the grounds are for empathizing with the humanity of the camp victims
(or of those who live through less stupendous disasters or people in real life or
historical sources worthy of empathy even though they have not fallen prey to
spectacular disasters at all).
the conclusion that humanity deserves some kind of empathy, that people feel the
pain of their fellows, seems obligatory: few living in a sentimental age can fail to
feel the tugs of evoked emotion as images of catastrophe and ruin are presented
for everyday consumption. But like Dean, LaCapra fails to explain how that
conclusion is to be reached, except by negation. Is the critique of humanitarian
idealism that it refuses to see the extremes and truth of abjection always simply a
cover for a quest for redemptive sublimity? If not, how is humanitarian idealism
to be defended? How to authorize LaCapras normative position that, no matter
the dangers of false affirmation and counterfeit redemption it courts, empathizing
with humanity is not simply possible but a worthy and indeed necessary activity
to ground the modern moral life (not to mention historical production)?
these questions are not posed rhetorically, but because the new emphasis
on empathy leads directly to them and makes them inescapable. If connecting
empathy to sympathy forces one to confront Kant, in other words, it also forces
one further. For there is not just Kants friendly and reconstructive criticism to
face. anothermore serious and radicalcharge, offered classically by Nietzsche
and updated since, is the decidedly more telling attack that sympathizing (or
even empathizing) with humanity is a value system only for slaves. In this
perspective, agamben is hardly the only thinker to question whether humanity
is the right ground value: for all the complication of his sources, and his reversal
of sublimity into abjection, he is in this regard a follower of Nietzsche, whose
critique of morality is precisely directed against the rise of compassion for
violated humanityagainst the culture of the victimof the sentimental age
31. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 20.
empathy IN hIStOry, empathIzINg WIth hUmaNIty
415
of modernity. I am opposed to the pernicious modern effeminacy of feeling,
Nietzsche wrote.
31
empathy, whatever its novelty, thus remains subject to old accusations. In some
sense, in the end, the concept of empathy remains paradoxically full and empty in
the thought of its new defenders precisely when restoring it to the longer history
of its intellectual and emotional culture suggests that it is not a solution but a
problem. more seriously, the theoretical commitments that drive their critique
of specifc acts of empathy threaten the viability of their basic commitment to
empathy itself. If the concept of empathy is to survive and prosper in contemporary
historical theory, not simply as a topic of important substantive research but also
as the normative framework of historical practice, it will have to contend with
its place in the history of sentiment, and face up to the criticism, loyal or hostile,
of the modern reign of sympathyincluding, perhaps, the criticism of the new
concepts most prominent historiographical defenders.
SAMUEL MOYN
Columbia University