Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living
152
Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living
152Paperback(New Edition)
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Overview
In Greek and Christian myth, in the philosophical and religious traditions of China and India, and across Western literature and art, gentleness occurs in moments of tenderness such as birth, care, and mutual love, but also where least expected, amid danger, humiliation, and cruelty. Gentleness, Dufourmantelle shows, is marked above all by our early human connections to the physical world, uncovered and rediscovered primarily through the senses, with all the ambivalences that entails.
Today, we are most familiar with a gentleness sold to us in the diluted form of mawkishness. This is how we try to evade its subtlety—no longer by fighting it, but by enfeebling it. In the name of our highest values—happiness, truth, security—we enforce “gentle” safeguards against hurt and are persuaded to participate in our era’s three divinities: efficiency, speed, and profitability. But in doing so we seal ourselves off from the life-affirming gamble that a true gentleness affords.
True gentleness entails an ethic of desire. Against a society that crushes human beings “gently” through consumerist logic and the illusion of total transparency, Dufourmantelle celebrates the uncompromising gentleness discovered by Gandhi and other revolutionaries. At the same time, within the despair confided by her patients, she traces the force of resistance and intangible magic that gentleness offers in the lived experience of ordinary women and men who fully embrace the risk of living.
This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780823279609 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fordham University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/06/2018 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 152 |
| Sales rank: | 227,474 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.90(w) x 7.30(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Anne Dufourmantelle (1964–2017), philosopher and psychoanalyst, taught at the European Graduate School and wrote monthly columns for the Paris newspaper Libération. Her books in English include Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy, and, with Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality. Dufourmantelle's death while seeking to rescue two children caught in a rip-tide attracted worldwide attention.
Catherine Malabou (Foreword By)
Catherine Malabou, holder of Visiting Chairs in numerous North American universities, teaches philosophy at the CRMEP (Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy) at Kingston University(UK). The most recent of her books are, Changing Difference: The Feminine in Philosophy, and, with Judith Butler, You Will Be My Body for Me.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
APPROACH
I have often asked myself and never found an answer whence kindness and gentleness come, I don't know it to this day, and now must go myself.
— GOTTFRIED BENN
In Latin dulcis signifies all possible gentlenesses, and suavitas describes God himself. Rhenish mysticism goes so far as to find an incomparable gentleness in nothingness. But philosophy doesn't treat gentleness this way; neither a concept nor merely a custom, it requires recognition but does not bend to judgment. Its apparent simplicity is misleading. And yet its singularity has always been confirmed. It is an active passivity that may become an extraordinary force of symbolic resistance and, as such, become central to both ethics and politics. It is also a way of life that has required development over millennia. Refinement has admittedly come from cruelty as well as from gentleness. No culture has acquired one without pursuing the other.
Gentleness is troubling. We desire it, but it is inadmissible. When they are not despised, the gentle are persecuted or sanctified. We abandon them because gentleness as power shows us the reality of our own weakness. Literature has given us memorable figures, notably Billy Budd, the servant of "A Simple Heart," the young Mohune, and so many others; most end in an asylum, in prison, or dead. The strangeness of their gentleness creates a scandal.
How can the lack of gentleness in existence, in memory, and in the fragility of beings be heard? This lack is barely audible; I don't even know if it is truly perceived. It arises by default within an increasingly present norm imposed by a society claiming to be democratic and liberal but whose consumerist logic makes beings indistinguishable within an economy that tolerates no qualms.
Gentleness is a force of secret life-giving transformation linked to what the ancients called "potentiality" [puissance]. Without it there is no possibility for life to advance in its becoming. I think that the power of life's metamorphosis is sustained in gentleness. When the embryo becomes a newborn, when the cocoon blossoms into a butterfly, when a simple stone becomes the stele of a sacred space in the gardens of Kyoto, there is, at the very least, gentleness. From listening to those who come to me and confide their despair, I have heard it expressed in each personal experience. I have felt its force of resistance and its intangible magic in the secret of what is called "transference." But I undoubtedly perceived it as a child in the tangible relationship to all things.
Gentleness summons the body, that is to say, the idea of a body that gentleness would embody and disembody at the same time. We can imagine that brutality is dissolved on contact with the uterine water protecting the baby, but not always. Gentleness does not belong only to the human race. It is a quality whose infinite range extends beyond the realm of the living.
CHAPTER 2
ORIGINS
Life places gentleness within us originally. We would think to grasp it from the source — a child sleeping soundly, the sweet taste of its mother's breast milk, voices that soothe, chant, caress — we guess it to be elsewhere, in the movement of an animal, the rise of darkness in the summer, the truce of a battle, the meeting of a gaze. We recognize it from the bedside of the dying, their gaze that calmly passes through their feverless agony, but even there it won't let itself be grasped. It comes to calm the fever of lovers and to oppose the executioner with a final breath, against which he can do nothing.
We perform acts of gentleness. We demonstrate gentleness. We soften the end of a life, its beginning. Gentleness is an enigma in its simplicity. It comes to recognize its own obviousness. As giver and receiver, it belongs just as much to touch as to thought.
Is it originally a quality of being? An experience? An ethic? A lie? Is there a primitive sensoriality that might have located gentleness one day?
Coming from further than living memory, there where mother and child are one, bodies merged, gentleness evokes a lost paradise. An original before that might be a dawn. But from the beginning there will already have been violence, terror, murder. Mimicry and competition that enflame hatred; no speech without betrayal and no civilization without an appeal to the most refined cruelty. Paradise is always already lost as it is measured against the origin, and this observation does not belong only to the melancholy. Living is a conquest wrenched from this passion of loss, a passion that is also an illusion reminiscent of epics, narratives, myths. We must have the courage to not consent to this lost paradise because it is a terrible mistake; it will open the door to all future resentments. It will justify the sacrifice.
Gentleness also comes after the separation and the searing pain of that first breath, after the hunger, after the anxiety, after the cry.
Disturbing, pacifying, dangerous, it appears on the edge. On the other side, once across the threshold. Of empty, of full, of space, of time, of heaven, of earth, it intrudes between signs, between life and death, between the beginning and the end. Indistinguishable from the range of feelings it accompanies — kindness, protection, compassion. It is bordered because it offers itself as a passage. In diffusing itself it alters. In indulging itself it metamorphoses. It opens in time a quality of presence within the tangible world.
Gentleness invents an expanded present. We talk about gentleness, acknowledging it, delivering it, collecting it, hoping for it. It is the name of an emotion of which we have lost the name, coming from a time when humanity was not dissociated from the elements, from animals, from light, from spirits. At what point did the human race become aware of it? What was gentleness opposed to when life and survival were merged?
CHAPTER 3
ANIMALITY
Of animality, gentleness keeps the secret. A fundamental and paradoxical wildness, as foreign to any kind of taming as childhood. Not falling only under the human condition, it delineates its limits. So close to animality that it sometimes merges with it, gentleness is experienced to the point of making possible the hypothesis of an instinct that it would call its own. It would be the trait of a primal "gentleness drive" of protection, of compassion — even of goodness itself. An instinct closest to the being that would be devoted not only to self-preservation but also relationships.
What the animal disarms in advance, even in its cruelty (outside the range of human barbarity), is our duplicity. The human subject is divided, exilic. If the animal's gentleness affects us in this way, it is undoubtedly because it comes to us from a being that coincides with itself almost entirely.
CHAPTER 4
TAKING CARE
In the beginning animals and humans go through the same stages. Without care, does a newborn survive? Doesn't it need to be protected, surrounded, spoken to, thought of, or imagined so it can truly enter the world? What does it become with an absolute lack of gentleness? A mother's care of the small mammal is another expression of the envelopment of what has not yet finished growing and finds itself threatened in its integrity. The study of early attachment indicates that the baby's body, like that of the animal, retains in memory all the intensities (and all the deficiencies) that have been lavished upon it. Any serious attack will endanger, now or later, its capacity to survive.
American philosophers have named this thought "care" because it allowed them to speak of the vulnerability of beings in a groundbreaking way. Taking the appropriate actions to curb the disease, close up the wound, alleviate the pain: from the beginning of humanity care has been related to gentleness. It expresses the good intention beyond what is given, beyond the medical act or the analgesic substance. Those who work with very premature babies know this, because the mysterious survival of those babies, who are fragile but also have astonishing resilience, may be due to the fact that a word, an act, have been given with tenderness. Is gentleness sufficient to heal? It equips itself with no power, no knowledge. Embracing the other's vulnerability means that the subjects cannot avoid recognizing his own fragility. This acceptance is a force; it makes gentleness a higher degree of compassion than simple care. To empathize, to "suffer with" is to experience with the other what he feels, without giving in to it. It means being able to open yourself up to others, their grief or suffering, and to contain that pain by carrying it elsewhere.
But gentleness is not only a principle of relation, regardless of the intensity behind it. It makes way for what is most singular in others. If the attention of gentleness, in the sense intended by Patocka as "care for the soul," beckons to our responsibility as human beings toward the world around us, toward the beings making up this world and even toward the thoughts we commit to it, then gentleness is part of an intimate connection to animality, to the mineral, the vegetal, the stellar.
CHAPTER 5
INTELLIGENCE
Gentleness is primarily an intelligence, one that carries life, that saves and enhances it. Because it demonstrates a relationship to the world that sublimates astonishment, possible violence, capture, and pure compliance out of fear, it may alter everything and every being. It is an understanding of the relationship with the other, and tenderness is the epitome of this relationship.
Philosophy is suspicious of emotions. For a long time they were a single factor of obfuscation or bewilderment of reason. Only thought could decant the intelligible from the sensible. And require us to consider wisdom outside the dominion of affection, of the body and of sensitive moods. Asking the tools of reason to apply themselves to gentleness is an intrusion by one order of knowledge into another that eschews precisely that order. Yet what it summons us to is essential: thinking of the value of what alters us "for the better," and what distributes itself in the form of conscience. Because it implies a relation of the subject to otherness, its quality does not only designate the substance or the atmosphere that it delivers but that which, in itself, establishes connections: "intelligere." Its privilege is agreement. It takes into account cruelty, the injustice of the world. Being gentle with objects and beings means understanding them in their insufficiency, their precariousness, their immaturity, their stupidity. It means not wanting to add to suffering, to exclusion, to cruelty and inventing space for a sensitive humanity, for a relation to the other that accepts his weakness or how he could disappoint us. And this profound understanding engages a truth.
We can't help but observe violence, fanaticism, brutality, cynicism; they reign within servility as much as they do within authority, and they continue to be exercised for all purposes. But if gentleness can have the intelligence to comprehend viol ence, sometimes including it in its inevitability or because it recognizes its history, then the reverse is not true. And there will always be nobility in gentle power — without condemnation, reexamining what devastates and what is devastated by violence.
There is an art that further illustrates the inherent intelligence of gentleness: the equestrian art. It requires agreement between human and animal to a high degree of refinement and complicity. One must comprehend (guess, tolerate) the other to the point of being accepted by him. The horse may be guided, trained, bridled, whipped, but it will accommodate the rider only if the latter knows how to gently find the lightness of hand and the movement that will adjust to the stride of the animal. There is in the equestrian an art of gentleness like no other. Its mastery has a history as long as that of the domestication of the horse; it has required centuries in order to find its rules, its value, its ethics. And this agreement is not given once and for all; it plays itself anew each time.
CHAPTER 6
POTENTIAL
Certain things are destined to happen according to a principle intrinsic to their nature. They will be called: potential [en puissance]. They carry a process dormant in its own becoming. Present in the most intimate of the living, they are a germination (dynamis in Greek) whose expansion also pertains to time itself. The sine qua non condition of the expression of this possible persistence of the living. The movement of life is to bloom or decay, there is no indeterminacy. Only idea accepts neutrality, but in time and reality, there is growth or decline (unbinding, Freud would say).
Aristotle identified power as the ability of a being to grow into his becoming. A seed contains a "potential" [en puissance] tree, although in its material reality nothing would allow us to detect it. It is an endogenous concept that finds in its process both its limit (we will not be able to make this kernel become a rose or an umbrella) and its fulfillment (the willow "realizes" the seed completely). Gentleness as power determines the ripening of what is until then idle within the thing itself. When the embryo develops, it "breathes" the amniotic fluid until the ninth month of gestation. Its lungs are still awaiting activation. And it is still very difficult for embryotic development specialists to understand how, and by what signal, this potential [en puissance] pulmonary respiration manages to be realized. We can be seized with vertigo before the complexity of the mechanics of the neurobiological signals necessary for this purpose and nevertheless be dazzled by the simplicity and the evidence with which the first cry of the newborn signals the metamorphosis. The same fundamental question arises for the embryologists with stem cells or in the case of the lungs: how does the cell "know" what it needs to perform? What the Ancients outlined in this way: at what moment is the soul "given form," at what moment does it breathe into matter? Does the soul that contemplates perfect forms have in memory — a token of reminiscence — the idea of gentleness? The question remains unresolved.
This force of metamorphosis will be approached by philosophers in several ways. The ontological foundation that Spinoza offers is that of conatus, in other words, the effort to persist in being. Nietzsche rejects this hypothesis while sketching the very essence of this concept in Will to Power. He considers that it is "the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation." Even more so than the perseverance of being by Spinoza's conatus, the Nietzschean will to power seems to be the antithesis of gentleness. Its contrary expression: force, intensified outpouring of life and metamorphosis of becoming into acquiescence to that same becoming. In support of that in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche poses gentleness as a formidable force of resistance to power. An ambivalent force born of a world sick with weakness, but a force stranger yet than any weakness. Gentleness is at times a decantation that requires in its essence an immense amount of accumulated, contained, and sublimated energy until it becomes immaterial. In this it may be an activation of the sensitive within the intelligible. Without it, would there be a possible passage between these orders?
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Foreword: Philosophy in Furs by Catherine MalabouTranslators’ Note
Introduction
Approach
Origins
Animality
Taking Care
Intelligence
Potential
The Sensory Celebration (I)
Sales Pitch
Language Sources
Justice and Forgiveness
East
A Silent Transformation
Feeling and Sensibility
The Symbolic Force of Gentleness
Free Form
Pure Gentleness?
Patrolling
Sensory Celebration (II)
Counterfeits
Exhaustion
Penumbra
“Master and Man” by Tolstoy
The Sensory Celebration (III)
Sublimation
Cruelties
In Hell
Listening
Trauma and Creation
At the Confines
Clandestine Gentleness
The Sensory Celebration (IV)
Childhood
Gentleness of Melancholy
Dolce Vita
A Gentle Revolution
Notes
Index
