Aruna D’Souza’s New Book Argues against Empathy

By Larissa Pham

When terrible things happen in the world and people suffer, by what means is one moved to act? And in whose interest? Do we respond by what tugs most effectively at our hearts—and if so, should we not be suspicious of where our sympathies lie?

Imperfect Solidarities, an essay-length book by writer and art critic Aruna D’Souza, puts forth an argument interrogating why we are moved to act in solidarity with others. Sparked by the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the surrounding social media commentary on all sides, D’Souza identifies the persistent—and misguided—belief in  empathy as key to political action in our neoliberal era. Empathy, she argues, values the emotional, atomized response of the individual witness over the systemic violence faced by the oppressed.

Empathy is a beguiling, buzzy term. Generally, and as D’Souza uses it here, it refers to this idea that we might understand the feelings of others—and perhaps even feel their emotions as our own. As embraced by pop-psychology and corporations alike, empathy is thought to promise a multitude of rewards: workplace advantages, strengthened relationships, and perhaps most enticingly, unity across difference. Moving the hearts of a compassionate public—the hearts of the hegemony, in other words—empathy, like its close correlate, love, is often positioned as the foremost force of revolutions.

D’Souza is wary of empathy as a political tool: too close to the ego, too satisfied by our own satisfaction, it prevents us from doing the difficult work of appreciating difference and challenge. In Imperfect Solidarities, D’Souza argues instead for a politics based in care. (One might also use the unglamorous term “duty,” though it does not appear in her book.) She writes: “I dream of a world in which we act not from a love of our fellow humans (and, for that matter, nonhumans), but from something much more difficult: an obligation to care for each other whether or not we empathize with them.” What would a political solidarity uninformed by understanding or agreement, and instead framed around a bare minimum of respect for life and dignity, look like?

D’Souza is first and foremost a critic, a writer deeply engaged with the visual arts. Her practice observes how contemporary art’s viewership, curation, and institutional housing—or lack thereof—intersect to provide a portrait of our times. Her book Whitewalling, published in 2018 by Badlands Unlimited, explored the relationship between art, race, and protest through three “acts,” or case studies: Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till in the 2017 Whitney Biennial; a 1979 show at The Artist’s Space titled with a racial slur; and a 1969 show at the Met titled “Harlem on My Mind,” which featured no Black artists.

Imperfect Solidarities offers new modes of thinking—and methods for solidarity—through the lens of contemporary art. The work of engaging with art, particularly that which does not cater to easy narratives, with its lack of straightforward metaphor, its glancing, sideways purview, can ask us to think in more slippery, radical, connective ways. The book’s premise prepares the reader for the author’s excellent, incisive commentary, which—sardonic at times, earnest at others—encourages us to think wider, allusively, imaginatively, over borders and boundaries.

D’Souza divides the book into four chapters, each hinging on a key concept. Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies (2008) is enlisted to discuss the merits of mis- and un-translation. Candice Breitz’s 2016 installation Love Story, which sets the performances of Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore opposite the real-life stories from six asylum seekers from which the actors’ monologues are drawn, invites an exploration of how empathy is often angled toward white viewers. And in a useful turn toward the curatorial, the 1980 A.I.R. show, “Dialectics of Isolation,” curated by Ana Mendieta, Kazuko Miyamoto, and Zarina Hashmi, evokes, along with its critical reception, a discussion of intersectionality and organizing across difference.

The book’s third chapter, “Connecting through Opacity,” is perhaps its most compelling: drawing upon the theorist Edouard Glissant’s writing on the sovereign subject’s “right to opacity,” D’Souza argues for the need to respect what in the other cannot be translated, spoken, or understood. What would it be like to not understand—and extend our hands in solidarity regardless? What would it be like to think of knowledge as no longer an extractive act, but a mutually respectful exchange, minimal as that exchange might be? Here, D’Souza references the artists Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Stephanie Syjuco as examples of artists interested in opacity. Syjuco’s photographic intervention upon archival photographs of Filipino “villagers” relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, to be exhibited in the 1904 World’s Fair, is particularly poignant. Syjuco’s hands, alive against the black and white archive, protect the faces of the photographed subjects, restoring their dignity, their private selves; the gesture reads simultaneously as a shield and a caress.

In its concision and power—nearly every sentence is a banger; whole swathes of the introduction in particular are eminently quotable—Imperfect Solidarities is reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, which deals with similar questions, and was itself a response to Virginia Woolf’s anti-war pamphlet Three Guineas. Where D’Souza’s text provides a valuable addition to this canon is her specific perspective: critical of the white hegemony, and writing toward a different—and more diverse—audience than Woolf or Sontag were. D’Souza’s politics, rather than argue for what ought to be commonly held rights, take the dismantling of white supremacy and systems of oppression as their baseline.

The argument D’Souza proposes is stubbornly tautological: We must care for living beings because they are alive; we must care for this planet because it is our home. This care is stolid, unsexy, and unrewarding. Imperfect Solidarities does not necessarily imagine what is to come, but instead advocates for a means of relating that might prove flexible enough to withstand all events and consequences. Perhaps one way forward is to reject the calls from our egos, the parts of us that are most swayed and moved by ease and familiarity, in order to reject any system, however temporarily comfortably it may keep us, that does not allow for the flourishing of every living being.