Empathy and the Geopolitical

This chapter focuses on medicine and empathy in the context of global capitalism. It argues that our affective interactions are necessarily embedded in, and inflected by, structural and material relations of power. Empathy emerges as an affect that follows existing routes of privilege. The first section, ‘Medical migrations’, analyses current debates about the relation of medical migration to inequalities in world health and traces the circuits by and through which medical resource is distributed. Turning to Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love, it is argued that Forna pays detailed attention to the unevenness of the global economics of medical resource, with specific reference to Sierra Leone. In the second section, Forna’s protagonist Adrian Lockheart is used to open up the question of how affect circulates, and where it sticks, in the novel and discusses Adrian’s empathetic misrecognition in the treatments of his patients in Sierra Leone. The final section asks whether change is possible in the novel, drawing out the significance of the novel’s double time frame to suggest that the unfulfilled political promise of the past can shape the future.

Empathy and Interdisciplinarity

This chapter asks how, in the context of the medical humanities, we might productively think across disciplinary domains and boundaries. It draws on Ian McEwan’s Saturday as a focus for positioning the question of interdisciplinarity within a specifically British context. The first section, ‘The two cultures’, surveys the ‘two cultures’ debate and its legacy and discusses the appearance of Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’ at a critical point of the novel. In the second section, ‘A third culture?’, the focus turns to McEwan’s engagement with popular science discourses and argues that it underpins a discernible conservatism in his work. The final section, ‘An unbounded view’, reads Saturday against the grain to argue that, in McEwan’s treatment of dementia a more positive, open-ended model for thinking across the arts and sciences might be seen to emerge.

Empathy and Capitalism

This chapter takes up the question of empathy’s intersection with medicine in the era of biocapitalism. The first section, ‘Emotional capital’, considers the concept of emotional capitalism; a culture in which emotional and economic practices mutually shape and constitute each other. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s analysis of ugly feelings, I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s representation of narrative voice in Never Let Me Go not as affectless, but as symptomatic of what happens when emotion is placed in the service of the marketplace. The second section, ‘Life stories’, moves on to the question of cloning, asking what kinds of life stories are produced in and through biotechnological interventions and arguing for Ishiguro’s interest in their political, as well as social and ethical, implications. ‘Ishiguro and biopolitics’ addresses the novel’s treatment of the global organ trade, asking how models of flow and exchange affect the capacity to care for others. The final section, ‘Empathy and art’, probes Ishiguro’s critical treatment as art as a vehicle for empathy, arguing that empathy becomes, in his vision, the ultimate realisation of the neoliberal subject.

Conclusion

The conclusion proposes the need for a more contextualised and a more politicised medical humanities. It also urges a repositioning of the arts and humanities so that they play a more critical, and potentially constitutive, role in relation to the medical. While the volume has been critical of mainstream medical humanities, its continued focus on empathy produces a thread of continuity across the first and second waves of activity in the field. In this sense, the conclusion indicates that, by fostering attunement to a more critically sensitive model of empathy, the medical humanities can move forward in new and surprising directions, as well as remaining grounded in, if differently oriented towards, its founding ethical commitments.

Empathy and Ethics

This chapter outlines a second key context for the resurgence of interest in empathy: the rapid growth of interest in human rights discourses in the early twenty-first century. The first section, ‘Cultivating empathy’, reviews key claims made by human-rights scholars concerning the empathy-building qualities of fiction, before outlining the critical response to such claims and introducing Edith Stein’s phenomenological model of empathy as a promising framework. The second section, ‘Reading humanitarian campaigns’ reads side by side Sara Ahmed and Virginia Woolf to provide a feminist underpinning for an other-directed approach to empathy. The third section, ‘Positioning the empathetic gaze’ reads Susan Sontag alongside Pat Barker to argue that both writers are cognisant, in looking at another’s suffering, of the implication of the gaze in structures of power and privilege. The final section, ‘Empathy and the institution’, focuses on Pat Barker’s Life Class to ask where and when the scene of empathy is situated, and with what effects.

Introduction

The Introduction begins by identifying the three central issues in the mainstream medical humanities that it sets out to address: the restriction of medicine to the individualised clinical encounter, its under-theorised understanding of empathy, and its positioning of literature as a transparent vehicle for conveying another’s experience. The section ‘Rethinking “medicine”’ opens up new perspectives on the clinical encounter as well as urging a definition of medicine that extends beyond its boundaries and concerns. The section ‘Theorising Empathy’ introduces the key conceptual frameworks of phenomenology and feminist affect theory. In ‘Re-situating fiction’, discussion centres on the act of reading which is not seen as offering access to another’s mind but as a key site in and through which the limits of empathy are currently being debated.

Empathy and Mind

This chapter begins to define empathy by looking at how the term circulates in popular scientific discourse. Empathy is discussed in the context of the emergence of brain-imaging technologies and the significant rise in diagnoses of autism and Asperger’s syndrome. The first section, ‘Locating empathy’, surveys the scientific research on empathy and autism emerging out of cognitive psychology, examining how different schools of thought have turned to the neurosciences to evidence their claims. The following section, ‘Phenomenology and empathy’, turns to phenomenology to identify a theory of empathy that is located not in the individual subject, but rather in the world that we share. In the final section, ‘Narrating autism’, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is discussed as a ‘syndrome novel’ that can open up reflection on the phenomenological dimensions of autism as well as the cultural politics of diagnosis.