Becoming everyone The politics of sympathy in Deleuze and Rorty
Tim Clark

The idea of a ‘politics of sympathy’ has its roots in the classical liberalism of the eighteenth century, represented quintessentially by Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. A best-seller in its time, Smith’s treatise can be read as preparing the ideological ground for the Wealth of Nations, furnishing the economic logic of capital with the kind of natural moral counterpart it will need to compensate for suboptimal effects within the system. As a charitable ‘interest in the fortune of others’, sympathy becomes, so to speak, the other invisible hand, directing civil society towards remedies for the less desirable consequences, unintended or otherwise, of a free-market economy (urban destitution, child labour, colonial slavery…)

Today, with capital fully operative on a global scale, Smith’s careful attempt to strike a balance between rational self-interest and sympathetic fellow-feeling may appear quaintly obsolete. In place of naturalist appeals to a common moral sense, neoliberal ethics prefers the tighter legalistic discourse of universal human rights. The social agenda, however, remains essentially the same. As Alain Badiou suggests, the current ethical ideology presupposes a world composed solely of ‘victims’ and ‘benefactors’, positing a general human subject who is ‘both, on the one hand, a passive, pathetic [pathétique], or reflexive subject – he who suffers – and, on the other, the active, determining, subject of judgment – he who, in identifying suffering, knows that it must be stopped by all available means’. At the heart of this ‘debased consensus’ we find once again the classic Smithian figure of the judicious spectator: that model liberal humanist for whom ‘politics is subordinated to ethics, to the single perspective that really matters in this conception of things: the sympathetic and indignant judgment of the spectator of circumstances.’

Acknowledging the force of Badiou’s polemic, the following article outlines an alternative politics of sympathy, derived in part from Deleuze’s reading of Hume, and developed by way of contrast with Rorty’s pragmatist ‘politics of sentiment’. If sympathy in its Rortyan sense, as a feeling for the one who suffers, effectively depoliticizes the intolerable by personalizing it, the Deleuzean alternative explored here presupposes a politics in which the feelings engaged are essentially impersonal: ‘affects’ rather than ‘sentiments’. The idea of an ‘impersonal sympathy’ may be oxymoronic, but it both registers a break with the liberal agenda and allows for a critical connection between the ‘feeling of justice’ in Hume and the concept of ‘becoming everyone’ in Deleuze.

Beyond sentiment
Paraphrasing D.H. Lawrence, Deleuze characterizes sympathy as ‘something to be reckoned with … a bodily struggle, hating what threatens and infects life, loving where it proliferates’.3 The inspiration here is Lawrence’s essay on Walt Whitman, in particular its concise formulation of a fundamentally Spinozan ethic: ‘My soul and my body are one.… What my soul loves, I love. What my soul hates, I hate.’ Whitman’s encounters with miserable souls (a slave, a leper, a syphilitic) serve as a foil allowing Lawrence to introduce and refine his own conception of sympathy. In the encounter with the slave, for example, Whitman’s response is parodied as follows: ‘That negro slave is a man like myself. We share the same identity. And he is bleeding with wounds. Oh, oh, is it not myself who am also bleeding with wounds?’ But true sympathy, Lawrence insists, cannot be a question of identification or participation, of sharing the slave’s sad passion, or bearing the other’s burden. Had Whitman truly sympathized, he would have said: ‘That negro slave suffers from slavery. … If I can help him I will: I will not take over his wounds and his slavery to myself. But I will help him fight the power that enslaves him … if he wants my help, since I see in his face that he wants to be free.’

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