is certainly familiar currency. A University of California research project, for example, has devoted itself to “the deep roots of human goodness,” fusing cognitive research with a social task by sharing “inspiring stories of compassion in action.”81 A MOOC (massive open online course) at Wesleyan asks students worldwide to perform a day of compassion as their final assignment, with a prize at the end, thus blending virtue and strategy in a way that would have appealed to the seventeenth century.82 This affective optimism spills over into popular work like Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization, which asks breathlessly, “Can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth?”83 Rifkin’s staging of a temporal drama alerts us to the centrality of heroic moments in studies that are pro-compassion, and suggests how easily such work can be exploited by those in power. The rhetoric of compassion is equivalent to the dangerous rhetoric of the “necessary” in its capacity to spur immediate political action in whatever sense the orator feels it should be directed.
Compassion is also big business. A Charter for Compassion, started by Karen Armstrong, with the Dalai Lama as mascot, rubber-stamps various institutions and companies as compassionate.84 The charter’s website provides a range of case studies as part of a “business compassion reader,” showcasing figures such as John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, who promotes executive sleepovers as a bonding experience. There’s a burgeoning field of therapeutic self-compassion, too. Paul Gilbert’s 2009 The Compassionate Mind draws on a liberal narrative of progress, calling for “the start of a compassionate awakening.”85 Self-compassion’s emphasis on doing things for oneself, on the self-training of what two practitioners call “portable therapy,” is entangled with the swiftly instrumentalized languages of cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness; it speaks of a moment at which larger social structures are failing many in need, where mental health is something one does, entrepreneurially, for oneself.86
This self-reliance recalls the language of American compassionate conservatism in the 1980s, when the influential evangelical Marvin Olasky set out the relations between compassion and enterprise. Effective compassion, Olasky argued, needs forms of nonpublic affiliation. Families work best when they help themselves, and compassion works best when women don’t take paid jobs but can organize soup kitchens instead.87 Such language, writes Berlant, “resituates who the subject of compassionate action ought to be,” turning that much-touted hardworking family into the focus of our care.88 This entrepreneurial compassion was revived by George W. Bush and has become standardized across party lines. Twenty years after Olasky, Barack Obama declared the United States to be competitive and compassionate, and in 2011 the UK’s David Cameron called for a “modern compassionate conservatism.”89 This neoliberal compassion is always quantifiable. Cameron even suggested that nurses should be promoted on the basis of their relative compassionate capacity (an early version of this quantification of care appears in Chapter 6).90 If compassion is meant to rally political sentiment in positive ways, pity—or its lack—is used today in a way that recalls the partisan rhetoric of the Wars of Religion. The day after the November 2015 attacks in Paris, then president François Hollande called for an “impitoyable” [“pitiless”] response to the terrorists, making an absolute affective division between two sides. The language of fellow-feeling, and its threatened lack, is central to contemporary modalities of political life that seek to create and maintain partisan divides to political and military ends.
How have scholars responded to this present time’s insistent language of compassion? If the Enlightenment probed compassion’s place in a rather abstracted social bond, in recent years scholars working on the underside of normative national cultures have proffered more specific critiques of contemporary compassion. Where a 1990s interest in trauma sought to operate or provoke compassion, more recent work seeks to study its effects.91 In these scouring readings of the contemporary, compassion blinds us to larger asymmetrical relations and to historically embedded structures of power. For both French and American critics of compassion, compassion is an antipolitics which focuses on particular cases of need instead of establishing wider political responses to inequality or suffering, but the difference in their approach tells us something of how difference itself is conceived in each national tradition.
In readings of French situations, an attention to compassion’s particularity allows us to see the frays in the apparently seamless universalism of the republican ideal. Through a compelling analysis of governmental and journalistic discourse, the anthropologist Didier Fassin explores the tensions between compassion and repression in immigration and asylum policy, reading immigration law as an oscillation “between a politics of pity and policies of control.”92 Miriam Ticktin pursues these insights by focusing on the French “illness clause,” a humanitarian exception in France’s 1998 immigration laws allowing suffering undocumented migrants to be granted immigration rights as a compassionate response to their particular need.93 Ticktin argues that compassion is “inherently exclusionary” since in determining the morally legitimate suffering body the possibility of larger and more collective forms of change is reduced. The body for whom the state feels compassion is, as Ticktin puts it, a victim without a perpetrator.94 Ticktin argues persuasively that this does not mean we should abandon care and compassion but that we must think about how “we might care differently.”95
In contrast, during and after the Bush years, U.S. scholars like Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman have traced what Berlant memorably calls “compassion’s withholding” in recent American history.96 For Berlant, “reparative compassion”97 has been central to liberalism’s attempts to grapple with the racial violence of American history: “Compassionate liberalism is, at best, a kind of sandpaper on the surface of the racist monument whose structural and economic solidity endures.”98 In a similar vein, Lee Edelman has explored “compassion’s compulsory disavowal of its own intrinsic callousness”; Edelman gives as an example the Catholic Church’s proffering of compassion to homosexuals only if they deny their sexuality.99 U.S. critiques of compassion often interrogate uninflected whiteness or heteronormativity, showing compassion to be a move that seeks to silence difference.100 “What if,” Berlant asks, “it turns out that compassion and coldness are not opposite at all but are two sides of a bargain that the subjects of modernity have struck with structural inequality?”101
Compassion is a key site for scholars who, like Berlant, cluster around what might loosely be called affect studies. If an emotion is understood to belong to an individual, to usher out from an interior core, then affect work has a rather different configuration, unattached to the self or the subject that might produce one of Reddy’s first-person emotives, instead emerging socially, extra-individually, often bodily.102 Thinking about affect enables us to read feeling within larger transpersonal or social networks and relations; it erodes our notion of what Elspeth Probyn, writing on Deleuzian affect, calls “the boundedness of bodies.”103 And compassion, of course, is a feeling dependent on sociality—it takes place because of a being-in-relation with another—even though it does not always signify a fellow-feeling or feeling together as much as a feeling about another or even a judgment on another’s feeling.
Affect work has tended to focus on contemporary cultures, and it is no accident that it has burgeoned in the United States since 2001, drawing on our own (often negative) emotions in relation to larger political situations. But the term has an important early modern heritage, derived loosely from Baruch Spinoza via Gilles Deleuze; it offers an occasion to put the early and late modern in a necessary and charged relation to one another. The early modern, read through the lens of affect studies, is not the birthplace of rationalist subjectivity as much as a moment when various assumptions about the relation of emotion to reason, or to body, or to self, had not yet hardened into familiarity.104 Where older models of emotion history imagined rationality to be set firmly against feeling—perhaps most of all in seventeenth-century France, the imagined home of a rigidly overdrawn Cartesianism—more recent work has eroded this distinction, which
