Bodies-in-Relation: Fine-Tuning Group-Directed Empathy

In this paper I analyze Alessandro Salice and Joona Taipale’s account of ‘group-directed empathy.’ I am highly sympathetic to Salice and Taipale’s account and intend this paper to be an endorsement of their project. However, I will argue that a more fine-grained account of group-directed empathy can be offered, and I seek to contribute to this discussion by outlining at least one way in which different types of group-directed empathy may be identified. I argue that while Salice and Taipale are right to claim that an account of group-directed empathy requires a corresponding account of ‘collective bodiliness,’ there is an important form of collective bodiliness that their account does not fully incorporate, namely embodied interaction between others. I argue that a closer look at the perceivability of interactions between others offers a richer and more complete account of how we can empathetically perceive shared emotions between groups of people.

Cosmopolitanism, Sociability and Assemblages of Symbolic Resources among Youths Attracted by Islam

On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork carried out among youths living in Montreal (Canada) who are interested in Islam and adopt some elements of a Muslim lifestyle, I show how affinities with Islam arise from sociability practices with friends of Muslim background and relate to the cultural diversification of secular societies. By combining network analysis with narrative analysis, I examine how youths interpret and make sense of these interactions and propose a critical view of their cosmopolitan discourses. While the latter is grounded in a universalist rhetoric, I argue it also unfolds within the intimacy of sociability experiences and shared emotions. Youth’s cosmopolitanism draws on cultural repertoires that stem from public education programs and local strategies to promote peaceable cohabitation in secular contexts. Consequently, youth competencies for cosmopolitanism lead to ongoing conversations that make differences and divergences within sociability spaces new sites to negotiate intercultural encounters in highly diversified localities.

Shared Emotions and the Body

According to individualism about feelings, only individuals can experience feelings, because only individuals live under the condition of embodiment. Assuming a necessary link between emotions and feelings thus seems to justify doubt about the possibility of shared emotions. I challenge this line of argumentation by showing that feelings are best understood as enactments of a feeling body, which is a psycho-physically neutral expressive unity. Based on the body’s embeddedness into a world and connectedness with others, feelings are perceivable and shareable. Accordingly, dynamics of mutual incorporation and interaffectivity are shown to be the ground for shared feelings.

How to Feel French: the politics of community and emotion in the Siege of Paris (1649)

As royal forces besieged Parisian frondeur rebels in early 1649, pamphleteers developed potent rhetorical tools to rally virtuous French people against the foreign enemies in their midst. Authors mixed contemporary conceptions of emotion with accepted wisdom on embodied traits in order to bind their audience together. Their vision of patrie community was defined by love and sacrifice for the innocent French, and rage against the foreigners who persecuted them. The rout of frondeur forces at the battle of Charenton on 8 February 1649 provided a tragic, but useful opportunity to distil this message. Propagandists imagined encounters between the royalist general Condé and his slain friend and lieutenant Châtillon to clarify the emotions and actions befitting a true Frenchman, in the throes of a burgeoning civil war. Even in the face of a stinging defeat, rebel authors effectively made shared emotions the foundation of a ‘pure’ French community.