<underfire> on compassion

[bracha L. Ettinger]

compassion is originary, it doesn't enter the commerce of any  
exchange, and from that point of view peace is not in dialogue with  
war. I don't have to feel empathy for my perpetrators, nor do I have  
to understand them, but this doesn't mean that I will hand them the  
mandate to destroy my own compassion which is one of my channels for  
accessing the non-I. To suffocate my own compassion would be a kind  
of mental and affective paralysis, since primary compassion is a  
spontaneous way of transsubjective knowing of/in the unknown Other  
before and beyond any possible economy of inter-subjective exchange.  
It is in that sense that in compassion one is fragilizing one's self.

Bracha
-----------------------------------------------------
Bracha L. Ettinger, Ph.D
Artist. Psychoanalyst. Clinical Psychologist.
Marcel Duchamp Professor of Psychoanalysis and Art, Media &  
Communications Division, EGS, Saas-Fee.
Research Professor of Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics of Art, AHRB  
Centre CATH, University of Leeds.
Member of Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TAICP).
http://www.metramorphosis.org.uk/
http://tcs.ntu.ac.uk/tcs/abstracts/21(1).html
http://www.amazon.com/Matrixial-Borderspace-Theory-Out-Bounds/dp/ 
0816635870
Tel (France): +33143256304 (in my absence, don't leave messages in  
this phone)
Tel (Israel): +97235446775 (in my absence, you can leave messages in  
this phone)



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