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 does not hold in many early modern texts.105 Recent work on the seventeenth century suggests that early moderns thought of what we now call the emotions as having a more social, more bodily, and more cognitively significant status than that rigorous divide would suggest.106 Reclaiming the early modernity of affect prompts a very different history both of early modern France and of critical theories of emotion.
Compassion’s Forms
Compassion is itself a medium, reaching for common ground between two parties. This book traces not so much the experience of compassion’s historical phenomenology (to use the term of Bruce Smith) but rather the way we know compassion through particular media, and in particular through the medium of the printed book and its various expositional devices.107 How do early modern texts in their various genres and material forms—books, pamphlets, staged plays—represent and construct compassion? The compassion I dissect here lives textually, but it frequently draws on books about “live” rhetorical persuasion, our oldest models for reflecting on the emotions, and that relation between performed gestures and the textual tradition is central to the weighing of the relation between inward emotion and its outward show in many of the texts I discuss.108 Textual compassion strives to indicate movements of the body or modulations of the voice, and to do so it will often look to new forms of writing.
Compassion’s forms also prompt us to look into the relation between reading and emotional response. There’s a powerful and popular narrative about reading and compassion, which has it that we can learn to feel for others through reading itself. Martha Nussbaum’s recent work on compassion, for example, glimpses compassion’s breadth at work in art forms that bring us the experiences of people for whom we might not otherwise feel. Nussbaum calls us to build a “public culture of compassion” by building “a bridge from the vividly imagined single case to the impartial principle by challenging the imagination.”109 Nussbaum is not attached to works from any single place or period (though