Abstract
From Aristotle’s Poetics to Proust’s Recherche, the >interruption< of empathetic dynamics — and not their celebration — has been defined as the ethical task of literature. This essay revisits crucial historical scenes — Greek Antiquity, the Enlightenment, Modernism — in which new facets of empathy and its interruption are discovered.
Zusammenfassung
Von Aristoteles’ Poetik bis zu Prousts Recherche ist die Unterbrechung empathischer Dynamik — nicht ihre Beförderung — als ethische Aufgabe der Literatur definiert worden. Dieser Essay sucht eine Reihe historischer Szenen — von der griechischen Antike über die Aufklärung bis zur Moderne — auf, an denen neue Facetten dieses Vermögens und seiner Unterbrechung entdeckt werden.
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Literature
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The most pertinent critique of this development is Wolfgang Schadewald, »Furcht und Mitleid?«, in: Hellas und Hesperien 1, Zürich 1970, 194–236.
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Alain Badiou has described therapeutics as the classical model of art. See Alain Badiou, Petit Manuel d’inesthétique, Paris 1998, 9–29.
A model for the detrimental historical dynamics of the affect »wrath« is sketched out in Peter Sloterdijk, Zorn und Zeit. Politisch-psychologischer Versuch, Frankfurt a.M. 2006.
Although Maggi, frequently accused of a Christian misreading of Aristotle, wrote his work earlier, Robortello published his commentary first. See D.W. Lucas, Aristotle’s Poetics: introduction, Commentary, and Appendixes, Oxford 1968
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Heinrich von Kleist, The Betrothai in Santo Domingo, in: The Marquise of O... and other Stories, transi. David Luke and Nigel Reeves, London 1978, 231. All emphases are mine.
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See Julia Kristeva’s reading of the Recherche which is focussed on the psychic dimension of profanation: Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible. Proust et Vexpérience littéraire, Paris 1994.
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Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Fast, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, New York 1981, I, 86.
This paradoxical logic is a part of a deconstructive layer of Proust’s novel, some of whose effects in this scene Paul de Man has analyzed as problems of »reading«: Paul de Man, »Reading (Proust)«, in: Allegories of Reading, New Haven 1979, 57–78.
Élie Metchnikoff, Studien über die Natur des Menschen. Eine optimistische Philosophie, Leipzig 1904, 37. Translation mine.
»J’ai pensé qu’un tel témoignage, avec la signification qu’il reçoit du drame qui l’a suivi de si près, avec la signification qu’il lui donne surtout, devait être rendu public«. Marcel Proust, Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide, in: Contre Saint-Beuve, Paris 1971, 150. Ail translations from the essay are mine.
See Jack Murray, »Melodrama in Proust«, Contemporary Literature 21/4 (1980), 572–587, here 572.
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Türk, J. Interruptions: Scenes of Empathy from Aristotle to Proust. Dtsch Vierteljahrsschr Literaturwiss Geistesgesch 82, 448–476 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374711
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374711