Drizzling sympathy: Ideal victims and flows of sympathy in Swedish courts

By connecting sociological perspectives on sympathy with the concept of ‘ideal victims’, this article examines how sympathy forms and informs legal thought and practices in relation to victim status in Swedish courts. In its broadest sense, sympathy can be understood as an understanding and care for someone else’s suffering and in many contexts victimization and sympathy are densely entangled. However, since ideals of objectivity and neutrality prevail in court, emotional norms are narrow and sympathy is met with suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Swedish courts, I argue that while sympathetic feelings are mostly backgrounded, they are still a central part of court proceedings and deliberations. The main findings suggest that prosecutors and victims’ counsel use ‘sympathy cues’ to evoke the judges’ concern for the complainants and to facilitate their empathic imagination of the complainant’s situation. In relation to this finding, judges engage in emotion work in order to not be affected by these sympathy cues. The study also shows that in encounters with ‘ideal victims’ who perform a playful resistance to their victimization, legal actors show sympathy more freely and accept moments of temporary relief from the normal interaction order in court.

‘The Cruel Radiance of What Is’: Empathy, Imagination and Estrangement in Johan van der Keuken's Face Value and Herman Slobbe

This article takes up film and imagination via the problem of empathy. Proposing a different entry into contemporary polemics over empathy, the ‘empathic imagination’ is reconceptualized as a problematic of form rather than psychological experience. That is, instead of adopting a pre-given notion of empathy to illuminate the relation between film and the spectator's moral imagination, this article considers how that imagination is constituted in and through the image to begin with. After tracing the genealogy of empathy ( Einfühlung) in German aesthetics, the concept is put into play through readings of ‘#Look Beyond Borders’, an online video produced by Amnesty International, and two documentaries by Johan van der Keuken – Face Value (1991) and Herman Slobbe (1966). In these works, the facial image is read as the imaginary terrain in which to explore very different notions of what might count as empathy and the empathic imagination in film and media.

How to Rise to Texts? On Joanna Pollakówna, an Essayist

The paper focuses on the essayistic output of Joanna Pollakówna, a poet and a historian of art, an author of several books of sketches devoted to European painting. It draws attention to the necessity of reading her poetry and essays – which are inseparable and illuminate one another – in a parallel way. The first part of the article analyses the way of treating art typical of Pollakówna: the experience of reception which reveals the following of the illumination, the awareness of significance, and mystery. The paper shows that the poet’s strategy towards the mystery of beauty consists in launching the empathic imagination capable of capturing the fleeting experience which seems to escape. The response to painting – which goes beyond the level of interpretation and chooses ‘adding’ rather than cataloguing meanings – is treated, after Didi-Huberman, as “capturing through the visible”, which leads to “producing and transforming”. The second part of the article is devoted to selected essays which manifest the transition from the intuition of mystery to the in-depth and creative answer of imagination: imagination following not only the work of art, but also the artist, the interesting relationship between them. References are made, for instance, to the private archive of the poet and her notes from art galleries. The reception of Pollakówna’s work is discussed in the conclusion of the paper. Quoting the voices of critics and the private correspondence of the poet with editors (which remains unpublished), one may argue that the essayistic method of the poet has been both acclaimed and not comprehended.