The Revolution Will Not Be Empathized: Political Imagination’s Affective Limits

• In Event: Race and Gender Theories of Punishment, Predation, and Political Imagination

Abstract

Political theorists, as well as political activists, have long disagreed over the proper method of achieving emancipation through politics. I address this debate using the feminisms of bell hooks and Catherine MacKinnon, Hannah Arendt’s critique of empathy in politics, and Kant's theory of imagination to present the feminist revolution as a potential case study for practicing an emancipatory politics that imagines a world without our current oppressions as realistic. Following bell hooks I broadly define the feminist revolution as the struggle against the systematic sexist oppression named patriarchy. Braiding this definition with Catherine MacKinnon’s analysis of said patriarchy, I argue that the only means of totally eliminating sexist oppression from our society is to entirely transcend our current gender ontologies and recreate what it means not only to become a woman but to be a human being entirely. However, this is not the aim of the majority of contemporary feminist theories and practices. To explain this mismatch, I propose that there has been a conflation of two different experiences of pain that women experience as a result of their womanhood, oppression, and suffering, and that this conflation necessarily prevents political action towards feminist aims. I outline how we should instead understand oppression to be a systematic injustice which always results from unjust human actions, whereas suffering is a consequence of an essentially imperfect and embodied human nature. I use practices of consciousness raising and other empathy-based approaches as pinnacle examples of feminist practices which confuse and conflate oppression and suffering, claiming they fall into an “empathy trap”. I define this empathy trap as the false belief that by alleviating their suffering through empathy the oppressed can overcome their oppression together and show that the desire for alleviating suffering in empathy is the root of destruction in emancipatory politics. I align myself with Hannah Arendt to instead argue that all empathy must be eliminated from politics, especially political relations between equals, and strengthen her claims with an analysis of Kant’s theory of imagination to argue that empathetic imagination is impossible and therefore all politics should focus on transcending oppression, not alleviating suffering. I conclude with further thoughts on the limits and potentials of imagination by calling for potential feminists to honestly weigh the prohibitive cost of the loss of womanhood with the potential benefit of a world without sexist oppression without the need to overpromise a future utopia with the alleviation of all suffering. In this way, the limits of human imagination need not act as barriers to a hopeful means of theorizing both the realistic sacrifices and promises of emancipatory political practice.

Author

• Miranda Lace, Harvard University