Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living by Anne Dufourmantelle

Author:Anne Dufourmantelle [Dufourmantelle, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Mind & Body, Social Science, Gender Studies, Psychology, Movements, Psychoanalysis
ISBN: 9780823279616
Google: q5WUDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07BBSQPDN
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Published: 2018-03-06T01:26:53+00:00

PATROLLING

To attack gentleness is an unnamed crime that our era often commits in the name of its divinities: efficiency, speed, profitability. We try to make it desirable, exchangeable, institutionalizable, so that it does not upset everything. We kill gentleness with gentleness. We make it into a contaminated drug, the need for which is inculcated in us.

The Dostoyevsky of The Brothers Karamazov summons gentleness in the scene of “The Grand Inquisitor.” The Inquisitor knows that no one can bear Christ’s return; he will therefore take upon himself the decision to condemn. Christ never departs for a moment from his gentleness, and it is that alone that defeats the power and the certainty of the Inquisitor. It comes to convert the forces of mortification, opening another path to the truth other than terror. Humans do not want the freedom that you offer them, says the Grand Inquisitor to Christ; I, who am conscious of this, offer myself as a sacrifice to that freedom, depriving them of it and taking the full burden. Humans prefer servitude; they want to be guided and discharged from the exorbitant choice of their existence. We see here that Freud had read Dostoyevsky, for what else does the obsessional neurotic do if he doesn’t avoid at all costs paying the price of a freedom that he does not want? As often in Dostoyevsky, it is on the edges of baseness, betrayal, violence that gentleness becomes revealing. The beings who lavish gentleness are suffused with it like a fever that contaminates their interlocutors far from their usual territories. In their incapacity to be in the world otherwise than in this failure appears an unprecedented relationship to freedom. Because gentleness appears first as a failure. It infringes all the rules of social etiquette. The beings who demonstrate it are sometimes resisters, but they do not carry on the fight where it usually takes place. They are elsewhere. As incapable of betraying as they are of betraying themselves, their power comes from an act that is always a way of being in the world. And the passion that arises from it comes from the emotion that only gentleness may liberate: it is another living.

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